1. Naturalism:American naturalism was a new and harsher realism. America’s literary naturalists dismissed the validity of comforting moral truths. They attempted to achieve extreme objectivity and frankness, presenting characters of low social and economic classes who were determined by their environment and heredity.
2 Puritanism: Puritanism is the practices and beliefs of the Puritans. They accepted the doctrine of predestination, original sin and total depravity, and limited atonement through a special infusion of grace form God.
3. Realism: Realism emphasizes on a faithful rendering of the ordinary, a slice of life as it is really lived. It expresses the concern for commonplace and the low, and it offers an objective rather than an idealistic view of human nature and human experience.
4. Romanticism:romantics frequently shared certain general characteristics: moral enthusiasm, faith in value of individualism and intuitive perception, and a presumption that the natural world was a source of goodness and man’s societies a source of corruption.
5 Transcendentalism:They spoke for cultural rejuvenation and stressed the importance of the individual. They offered a fresh perception of nature as symbolic of the Spirit or God. Nature was, to them, alive, f illed with God’s overwhelming presence.
6. Imagism意象主义:It’s a poetic movement of England and the U.S. flourished from 1909 to 191
7.The movement insists on the creation of images in poetry by “the direct treatment of the thing” and the economy of wording.
7. Local Colorism:fiction or poetry that focuses on specific features –including characters, dialects, customs, history, and landscape – of a particular region.
8. Lost Generation:It describes the Americans who remained in Paris as a colony of “expatriates” or exiles. It describes the writers like Hem ingway who lived in semi poverty. It describes the Americans who returned to their native land with an intense awareness of living in an unfamiliar changing world.
9. Beat Generation: It was a group of American post-World War II writers who came to prominence in the 1950s .They rejected conventional social and moral values; expressed their alienation in their works from c onventional “square” society by adopting a life style which featured sex, drugs, jazz and the freedom of the open road.
10. Symbolism: Symbolism is the writing technique of using symbols. 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 tha t poets employ in creation.
11.Modernism：is loosely a synonym of anything contemporary. Strictly, Modernism began in the late 19th century and regarded the theory of psycho-analysis as its theoretical base. They pay more attention to the psychic time than the chronological one.
12.A Jazz age(爵士时代):The Jazz Age describes the period of the 1920s and 1930s.With the rise of the great depression, the values of this age saw much decline. Highlighting what some describe as the decadence and hedonism, as well as the growth of individualism.
