美国文学名词解释

1、puritan thought:

i : to make pure their religious beliefs and practices

ii: wish to restore simplicity to church services and the authority of the Bible

iii: Puritans should include all kinds of people, humblest loftiest(最高贵的) ,poor

and rich.

iiii: Puritans opposition to pleasure and their lives were disciplined and hard

iiiii: Puritan religious teaching tended to emphasize the image of a wrathful (愤怒的)God and forget His mercy.

2、Transcendentalism (超验主义 )

American Romanticism culminated around the 1840s in what has come to be

known as “New England Transcendentalism” or “American Renaissance”. It served

as an ethical guide to life for a young nation and brought about the idea that human

can be pefected by nature. It stressed religious tolerance, called to throw off

shackles of customs and traditions and go forward to the development of a new and

distinctly American culture. The leading transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson,

whose Nature has been called “The Manifesto of American Transcendentalism”

and whose “The American Scholar” has been rightly regarded as America’s

“Declaration of Intellectual Independence”, advocated a direct intuition of a spiritual

and immanent God in nature. Like him, most transcendentalists advocated idealism

that was great needed in a rapidly expanded economy where opportunity often

became opportunism, and the desire to “get on” obscured the moral necessity for

rising to spiritual height. The views they kept helped to create the first American

Renaissance- one of the most prolific period in American literature.

3、The Lost Generation

After the First World War, some young writers voluntarily left America and

settled in Paris, and others who stayed behind felt themselves to be exiles in spirit.

All of them were “outsiders” who observed America society and culture

objectively , from distance and tried to create new types of writing . Many of them

took part in the war in Europe , experiencing shock, wounds and the death of close

friends . They shunned避开 the false idea of success put forth by the social system

and looked on art as both a refuge庇护 from bourgeois society and mirror in which

America could be shown its true face. Cut off from the life of their own country by

choice , cut off from a sense of historical continuity by the First World War, they

were named “the Lost Generation”. Hemingway, Cummings and Pound have been

the representatives of such writers.

(An American woman writer named Gertrude Stein (1874- 1949) , Who had

lived in Paris since 1903, welcomed these young writers to her apartment which

was already famous as a literary salon. Stein was the advisor, friend, and confidante

of some of the great friend, and confidante of some of the great French and

American artists and writers of the time . In the early 1920 Ezra Pound joined her

group and together they encouraged and helped such young writers as Hemingway

and Cummings , both had suffered in the war . She called them “The Lost

Generation” a name which stuck to them, because they had cut themselves off from

their past in America in order to create new types of writing which had never been tried before.)

4、The Southern Literature

The American South is a very distinctive region. The inhabitants are

distinguished from other Americans by their Southern accent口音, culture and

outlook, and their special history. The Civil War defeated and destroyed the South .

The landowners became poor and backward and embittered 受苦的. In time , a new

class was formed by low-class, landless people. They learned modern methods of

business and farming , and began to replaced the traditional ruling class in position

of power . These harsh苛刻的 conflicting social elements form the background of

“Southern Fiction”, which is often twisted , violent and pessimistic.

Southern fiction had its roots in Edgar Allen Poe(1809-1849), whose strange ,

frightening tales had a dark , nightmarish quality even before the Civil War . The

foremost Southern writer of 20th century was William Faulkner (1897-1962). He

wrote feelingly of the decaying white upper class and crude , energetic white

upstarts 暴发户. Faulkner was followed by some outstanding writers as Thomas

Wolfe, Robert Penn Warren and Katherine Anne Porter, Carson Mc-Cullers . The

later two were female writer whose work contained more delicate nuances细微差别 of feeling and were quite original.

5、The Jewish Literature

It is difficult to state exactly what is meant by Jewish Literature in America

because all Jewish writers do not concern themselves only with Jewish subject.

Norman Mailer , Allen Ginsberg and the like are not necessarily identifiable as