美国文学名词解释

1 The Enlightenment（启蒙运动）: The Enlightenment was an intellectual

movement originating in France, which attracted widespread support among the ruling

and intellectual classes of Europ e and North America in the second half of the 18th

century. It characterizes the efforts by certain European writers to use critical reason to

free minds from prejudice, unexamined authority and oppression by Church or State.

Therefore, the Enlightenment is sometimes called the Age of Reason

2 American Dream(美国梦): It is the faith held by many in the United States

of America that through hard work, courage, and determination one can achieve a

better life for oneself, usually through financial prosperity. These were values held by

many early European settlers, and have been passed on to subsequent generations.

Nowadays the American Dream has led to an emphasis on material wealth as

measure of success or happiness

3. Transcendentalism (超验主义、先验主义) : It was a group of new ideas in

literature, religion, culture and philosophy that emerged in New England in the middle

19th century. It began as a protest against the general state of culture and society.

Among transcendentalist’s core beliefs was an ideal spiritual state that “transcends”

the physical and empirical(以观察或实验为依据的) and is only realized through the

individual’s intuition, rather than through the doctrines of established religions.

Prominent transcendentalists included Ralph Waldo Emerson（爱默生）, Henry David

Thoreau（梭罗）, Walt Whitman（惠特曼）, etc. It is a kind of philosophy that stresses

belief in transcendental things and the importance

of spiritual rather than material existence. （相信超凡的事物，认为精神存在比物质存在更重要).

4. American Puritanism: It is the practices and beliefs of the Puritans. The

Puritans were originally members of a division of the Puritan Church. The first settlers

who became the founding fathers of the American nation were quite a few of them.

They were a group of serious, religious people, advocating highly religious and moral

principles. As the word itself hints, Puritans wanted to purity their religious beliefs and practices. They accepted the doctrine of predestination宿命论, original sin and total

depravity性恶说, and limited atonement 有限的救赎 through a special infusion 浸渍 of grace from God. As a culture heritage, Puritanism did have a profound influence

on the early American mind.

：It is the writing technique of using symbols. It’s a literary movement that arose

in France in the last half of the 19th century and that greatly influenced many

English writer, particularly poets, of the 20th century. It enables poets to compress a

very complex idea or set of ideas into one image or even one word. It’s one of the

most powerful devices that

poets employ in creation.

novel is a type of romance very popular late in the 18th century and at the

beginning of the 19th novel emphasizes things which are grotesque怪异的，

violent， mysterious， supernatural，desolate 荒凉 and horrifying. Gothic， originally

in the sense of “medic医学，not classical”，with its descriptions of the dark，irrational

side of human nature，Gothic novel has exerted a great influence over the writers of

the Romantic period.

8 Imagism: it’s a poetic movement of England and the flourished from 1909 to

1917. The movement insists on the creation of images in poetry by “the direct

treatment of the thing” and the economy of wording. The leaders of this movement

were Ezra Pound and Amy Lowell艾米•洛威尔.

8. Imagism: It came into being in Britain and around 1910 as a reaction to the

traditional English poetry to express the sense of fragmentation and dislocation. The

imagists, with Ezra Pound leading the way, hold that the most effective means to

express these momentary impressions is through the use of one dominant image.

Imagism is characterized by the following three poetic principles: direct treatment of

subject matter; economy of expression; as regards rhythm, to compose in the

sequence of the musical phrase, not in the sequence of metronome节拍器. Pound’s

“In a Station of the Metro” is a well-known imagist poem. 9. Stream of Consciousness(意识流): It is a style used in the presentation of the

character’s inner working of mind. The assumption is that an individual’s

psychological processes are a continuous flow like a shifting, uninterrupted stream,

highly changeable and confusing, often appearing illogical and contrary to reason. In

tracing the stream of consciousness of an individual the writer may present interior

monologue(内心独白) by his character, hint with symbols, reverse(颠倒) the order of

time, and alternate（轮流的／交替的） recollections（回忆） with the present or