美国文学名词解释 -

1.American Puritanism清教It comes from the American puritans, who were the first immigrants moved to American continent in the 17th century. Original sin, predestination（预言）and salvation（拯救）were the basic ideas of American Puritanism. And, hard-working, piousness（虔诚,尽职），thrift and sobriety（清醒）were praised.Characteristics: 特点1. Idealistic: Puritans pursue the purity and simplicity in worship. They focuse the glory of God, and the angry God.They believe in the doctrine of destiny, original sin, limited atonement2. Practical: Puritans come to Amrican to do business and make profits with the desire of chasing wealth and status. They have to struggle for survival under the severity of the western frontier.3 .The struggle between the spiritual and the material is the basics of the Puritan mind. On the one hand, Puritans chase the purity of the early church.On the other hand, they come to America to earn money. This contradictory will be reflected by their thoughts.4. In a word, it rests on purity, ambition, harding work, and an intense struggling for success.2.Romanticism浪漫主义: the literature term was first applied to the writers of the 18th century in Europe who broke away from the formal rules of classical writing. When it was used in American literature it referred to the writers of the middle of the 19th century who stimulated（刺激）the sentimental emotions of their readers. They wrote of the mysterious of life, love, birth and death. The Romantic writers expressed themselves freely and without restraint. They wrote all kinds of materials, poetry, essays, plays, fictions, history, works of travel, and biography.3.Transcendentalism先验说,超越论:is a philosophic and literary movement that flourished in New England, particular at Concord, as a reaction against Rationalism and Calvinism (理性主义and喀尔文主义). Mainly it stressed intuitive understanding of God, without the help of the church, and advocated independence of the mind. The representative writers are Emerson and Thoreau.4.American Realism现实主义: In American literature, the Civil War brought the Romantic Period to an end. The Age of Realism came into existence. It came as a reaction against the lie of romanticism and sentimentalism. Realism turned from an emphasis on the strange toward 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 experience5.Local colorism乡土文学: is a type of writing that was popular in the late 19th century, particularly among the authors in the south of the U.S.. this style relied heavily on using words, phrases, and slang that were native to the particular region in which the story took place. local colorists tried to immortalize(使不朽) the distinctive natural, social and linguistic features. It is characteristic of vernacular(本国语) language and satirical(讽刺的)humor. A well-known local colorism author was Mark Twain with his books Tom Sowyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.6.Naturalism自然主义: American naturalism was a new and harsher realism.It was initiated in France. American naturalism had been shaped by the war; by the social upheavals（剧变）that undermined the comforting faith of an ear lier age. America’s literary naturalists attempted to achieve extreme objectivity and frankness, presenting characters of low social and economic classes who were determined by their environment and heredity. Although naturalist literature described the world with sometimes brutal realism, it sometimes also aimed at bettering the world through social reform.7.Stream of consciousness意识流：It is one of the modern literary techniques. It is the style of writing thatattempts to imitate the natural flow of a character’s thoughts, feelings, reflections, memories, and mental images as the character experiences them. It was first used in 1922 by the Irish novelist James Joyce. Those novels broke through the bounds of time and space, and depicted vividly and skillfully the unconscious activity of the mind fast changing and flowing incessantly。

1.A m e r i c a n P u r i t a n i s m清教2.It comes from the American puritans, who were the first immigrants moved to American continent in the 17th century. Original sin, predestination（预言）and salvation（拯救）were the basic ideas of American Puritanism. And, hard-working, piousness（虔诚,尽职），thrift a n d s o b r i e t y（清醒）w e r e p r a i s e d. Characteristics: 特点1. Idealistic: Puritans pursue the purity and simplicity in worship. They focuse the glory of God, and the angry God.They believe in the doctrine of destiny, original sin, limited atonement2. Practical: Puritans come to Amrican to do business and make profits with the desire of chasing wealth and status. They have to struggle for survival under the severity of the western frontier.3 .The struggle between the spiritual and the material is the basics of the Puritan mind. On the one hand, Puritans chase the purity of the early church.On the other hand, they come to America to earn money. This contradictory will be reflected by their thoughts.4. In a word, it rests on purity, ambition, harding work, and an intense struggling for success.3.Romanticism浪漫主义: the literature term was first applied to the writers of the 18th century in Europe who broke away from the formal rules of classical writing. When it was used in American literature it referred to the writers of the middle of the 19th century who stimulated（刺激）the sentimental emotions of their readers. They wrote of the mysterious of life, love, birth and death. The Romantic writers expressed themselves freely and without restraint. They wrote all kinds of materials, poetry, essays, plays, fictions, history, works of travel, and biography.4.Transcendentalism先验说,超越论: is a philosophic and literary movement that flourished in New England, particular at Concord, asa reaction against Rationalism and Calvinism (理性主义and喀尔文主义). Mainly it stressed intuitive understanding of God, without the help of the church, and advocated independence of the mind. The representative writers are Emerson and Thoreau.5.American Realism现实主义: In American literature, the Civil War brought the Romantic Period to an end. The Age of Realism came into existence. It came as a reaction against the lie of romanticism and sentimentalism. Realism turned from an emphasis on the strange toward 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 experience6.Local colorism乡土文学: as a trend became dominant in American literature in the 1860s and early 1870s，it is defined by Hamlin Garland as having such quality of texture and background that it could not have been written in any other place or by anyone else than a native stories of local colorism have a quality of circumstantial(详细的) authenticity(确实性), as local colorists tried to immortalize(使不朽) the distinctive natural, social and linguistic features. It is characteristic of vernacular(本国语) language and satirical(讽刺的) humor7.Naturalism自然主义: American naturalism was a new and harsher realism. American naturalism had been shaped by the war; by the social upheavals（剧变）that undermined the comforting faith of an earlier age. 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. Although naturalist literature described the world with sometimes brutal realism, it sometimes also aimed at bettering the world through social reform.8.Stream of consciousness意识流：It is one of the modern literary techniques. It is the style of writing that attempts to imitate the natural flow of a character’s thoughts, feelings, reflections, memories, and mental images as the character experiences them. It was first used in 1922 by the Irish novelist James Joyce. Those novels broke through the bounds of time and space, and depicted vividly and skillfully the unconscious activity of the mind fast changing and flowing incessantly。

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 Reason2 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 happiness3. 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 importanceof 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 andpractices. 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 thatpoets 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 po etry 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 sometime illusions（幻想）with given facts.10. Point of view( 视角)：It is a term referring to the vantage point(能观察某事物的有利位置) or position from which a story is told. To identify（识别）the narrator of a story is to identify the story’s point of view. Basically there are two narrative ways: first-person point of view and the third-personpoint of view.12. The Harlem Renaissance: it was the first important movement in black American literature. Immediately after the First World War, as a result of a massive black migration to Northern cities, a group of young, talented black artists congregated in Harlem, a predominantly black section of New York City, and made it the cultural, and intellectual capital of black America. They carried forward the cultural traditions of their people and demonstrated their achievements to the white society that habitually ignored them.13. Expressionism 表现主义: it arouse in German theater after World War I. Delighting in bizarre (奇异的) stage design and exaggerated makeup and costuming(服装), expressionists sought to reflect intense states of emotion. Its mode is “the externalization(外表性) of t he inner.”humor: It is a combination of humor with resentment(怨恨), gloom, anger, and despair. Seeing all that is unreasonable, hypocritical, ugly, and even frenzied(狂乱的)，writers of black humor nurse a grievance(不平) against their society which, according to them, is full of institutionalized(制度化的) absurdity. Yet they are cynical. They laugha morbid(病态的) laugh when facing the hideous（丑恶的）. In hopeless indignation （愤慨）they take up freezing irony and burning satire as their weapons. Their novels are often in the form of anti-novel（反传统小说）, devoid of(缺乏) completeness of plot and characterized by fragmentation（零碎的）and dislocation（混乱）.。

【优质】美国文学名词解释（一）About Puritanism清教主义1.“would-be purifier”They wanted to purify the English Church and to restore church worship to the “pure and unspotted”condition of its earlier days.They opposed the elaborate rituals of the English Church. They believed that the Bible was the revealed word of God, therefore, people should guide their daily behavior with the Bible.2.Basic Puritan Beliefs（1）T otal Depravity - through Adam's fall, every human is born sinful - concept of Original Sin.（2）Unconditional Election - God "saves" those he wishes - only a few are selected for salvation - concept of predestination（3）Limited Atonement - Jesus died for the chosen only, not for everyone.（4）Irresistible Grace - God's grace is freely given, it cannot be earned or denied. Grace is defined as the saving and transfiguring power of God.（5）Perseverance of the "saints" - those elected by God have full power to interpret the will of God, and to live uprightly. If anyone rejects grace after feeling its power in his life, he will be going against the will of God - something impossible in Puritanism.2.The impact of Puritanism (1)High standards of moral excellence and conscience ;(2) Emphasis on education(3)Hard working, thrifty, independent spirit;(4)“Chosen people”consciousness .(诺斯替教）（二）Enlightenment(启蒙运动)Enlightenment is man’s leaving his self-caused immaturity.Immaturity is the incapacity to use one's intelligence without the guidance of another.@A term used to describe the trends in thought and letters in Europe and the American colonies duringthe 18th century prior to the French Revolution. The precursors of the Enlightenment can be traced to the 17th century and earlier.@The phrase was frequently employed by writers of the period itself, convinced that they were emerging from centuries of darkness and ignorance into a new age enlightened by reason, science, and a respect for humanity.（三）Romanticism （浪漫主义）As an approach in literary creation, romanticism is ever present in literature of all times. But as a literary trend or movement, it occurred and developed in Europe and America at the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries under the historical background of the Industrial Revolution around 1760 and the French Revolution (1789-1799). @ A movement in the literature of virtually every country of Europe, the United States, and Latin America that lasted from about 1750 to about 1870,@It was characterized by reliance on the imagination and subjectivity, freedom of thought and expression, and an idealization of nature.（四）Transcendentalism（超验主义）Transcendentalism is the summit of the Romantic Movement in theU.S. in the first half of the 19th century. It asserts the existence of an ideal spiritual reality that transcends the empirical and scientific and is knowable through intuition .Transcendentalists place emphasis on the importance of the Over-soul, the individual and Nature. It was, in essence, romantic idealism on Puritan soil.（五）Free versepoetry without a fixed beat or regular rhyme scheme.(六）Blank verse“Blank verse” is poetry written in regular metrical butunrhymed lines, almost always iambic pentameters.（七）American Realism (1865—1918)（现实主义）American Realism came in the latter half of the nineteenth century as a reaction against Romanticism. It stresses truthful treatment of material. It focuses on commonness of the lives of the common people, and emphasizes objectivity and offers an objective rather than an idealistic view of human nature and human experience. The three dominant figures of the period are William Howells, Mark Twain, and Henry James.（八）Definition of Local Color（乡土特色）1.Literature that focuses on the characters, dialect, customs, topography（地形）, and other features particular to a specific region that exploits the speech, dress, mannerisms, and habits of thatspecific region .2.Twain’s Local colorismTwain preferred to present social life through portraits of the local characters of his regions, including people living in that area, the landscape, and other peculiarities like the customs, dialects, costumes and so on. So the rich material of his boyhood experience on the Mississippi became endless resources for his fiction, and the Mississippi valley and the west became his major theme.（九）American Naturalism (1890s-1910s) （自然主义）1.Historical Background:—The spread of industrialization created extremes of wealth and poverty. —Farmers were still going westward, but frontiers were about the close. They had to depend on the transcontinental railway to transport their products.—The spread of Darwin’s theory of evolution changed people’s ideology.2. Thematically, naturalistic writers：-- wrote detailed descriptions of the lives of the downtrodden and of the abnormal-- had frank treatment of human passion and sexualit-- were concerned about how men and women were overwhelmed by the forces of environment and by the forces of heredity-- made detailed documentation of life: nothing but the truth, more naked and wicked than realism-- created gloomy and pessimistic atmosphere3. Here are the major features of naturalism.Humans are controlled by laws of heredity and environment.The universe is cold, godless, indifferent and hostile to human desires. @Naturalistic writers are pessimistic. They choose their subjects from the lower.(10)Modernism（现代主义）(1)appeared after World War I(2)cutting off history and a sense of despair and loss(3)refusing to accept the traditional concept of value and all traditional ideological influences.1. BackgroundIn the first world war, America got considerable benefits with animal cost, but many artist and thinkers with suffering consciousness felt the terribleness of modern wars.Their heroism in mind gradually disappeared. Some of them going into battle suffered the sight of blood and all kinds of disasters. After back to America, they found that the social reality had experienced great change.2.Features or changes of the period(1)Increasing industrialization (2)Deepening urbanization(3)High speed development of technology and science(4 )Trauma of the first world war(5)1930s economic depression(6)Collapse of social value system(7)Dropping moral standards(8)Commondepression , fear ,sense of loss3. Features of the worksFreud’s psychoanalysis ,William James stream of consciousnesstheory and archetypal symbol had great impact on the writers of modern American writers. They pay special attention to the inner world of the people, during this period ,the most compelling literature movement is the writer’s self exile, also known as the second American renaissance .(十一）Novelists ——the Lost Generation“迷惘的一代”(1920s) The novelists who produced a literature of disillusionment in the aftermath of World War I, and some of them lived abroad:(1)Used their wartime experience as the basis for their works (2)were cut off from old values yet unable to come to terms with the new era(3)wondered pointlessly and restlessly(4)were frustrated by the war(5)spokesman ——Hemingway(十二）The Jazz AgeThe Jazz Age is the nickname in America of the decade of the 1920’s, beginning from 1919 to the Crash at the end of 1929.These ten years were, for Americans, a time of carefree prosperity, isolated from the world’s problem, bewildering great social change, and a feverish pursuit of pleasure.These were the ten years when the First World War was just over, when new inventions and manufacturing techniques greatly changed the way people lived; when people moved from the countryside in great numbers; when women won the right to vote and many started to earn their own money; when cars,washing machines,radios and vacuum cleaners became commonplace; and when millions of people lived beyond theirmeans and went into debt in order to obtain such things while the middle class frantically pursued individual “success”and personal enjoyment. They lived a rich, extravagant, frivolous moneymaking life, and it was this style of living gave the decade of the 1920’s such nickname as the “Jazz Age”, the “Dollar Decade”, and the “Roaring Twenties.”（十三）Imagism(1900S-1910S)(意象派)The Imagist movement included English and American poets in the early twentieth century who wrote free verse and were devoted to "clarity of expression through the use of precise visual images." The Imagist Movement began in London and later spread to the US. It underwent three major phases in its development.（十四）IronyA contrast or discrepancy between what is said and what is meant or between what happens and what is expected to happen in life and in literature.- 高氯酸对阿胶进行湿法消化后, 用导数火焰原子吸收光谱技术测定阿胶中的铜、“中药三大宝, 人参、鹿茸和阿胶。

1 Naturalism: Naturalism is a movement in theater, film, and literature that seeks to replicate a believable everyday reality. Natural istic writers were influenced by the evolution theory of Charles Darwin. (3′)They believed that one's heredity and surroundings decide one's character. ( 2′)2.The Local Colorism: Hamlin Garland defined local colorism as having quality of texture and background that it could not have been written in any other place or by anyone else than a native.( 3′) Texture refers to the elements which character a local culture, elements such as speech, customs and mores peculiar to one particular place. ( 2′)3. American Realism: American Realism came in the latter half of the nineteenth century(1′) as a reaction against “the lie” of romanticism and sentimentalism. (1′) It expressed the concern for the world of experience, of the commonplace, and for the familiar and the low. (3′)4. Hemingway Hero: The Hemingway hero is an average man of decidedly masculine tastes, sensitive and intelligent, a man of action, and one of few words. ( 2′) That is an individualist keeping emotions under control, stoic and self-disciplined in a dreadful place. These people are usually spiritual strong, people of certain skills, and most of them encounter death many times. ( 3′)5. Harlem Renaissance: Black literature flourished in the 1920s in the Northeast part of New York City called Harlem. ( 2′)Black literature developed into a upsurge which has come to be known as the Harlem Renaissance, which reflects the feelings, the experience, the history and the ambition of the Black people. ( 3′)6. Puritanism is code of values, the philosophy of life and a point of view. Puritans take religion as the most important thing, (2′)living for glorying God, believing predestination, origin sin, limited atonement, total depravity. They live a frugal , diligent life. ( 2′)7. Image: An image is defined by Pound as that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex (1′)in an instant of time, “a vortex or cluster of fused ideas” “endowed with energy”. (1) The exact word must bring the effect of the object before the reader as it had presented itself to the poet’s mind at the time of writing. (1)8. Jewish Literature: Jewish literature refers to published creative writings by American Jews about their American experiences. (2′) This kind of writings is shown in Jewish perspective. (2′)9. American Realism: American Realism came in the latter half of the nineteenth century(1′) as a reaction against “the lie” of romanticism and sentimentalism. (1′) It expressed the concern for the world of experience, of the commonplace, and for the familiar and the low. (3′)10. The Black Humor: It refers to the use of morbid and absurd for darkly comic purpose. (1′) It carries the tone of anger, bitterness in the grotesque situation of suffering, anxiety, and death. (2′)It makes the reader laugh at the blackness of modern life. (1′)。

1.Imagism（意象派）: It’s a poetic movement of England and the U.S. 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 P ound and Amy Lowell.2.Local colorism: as a trend became dominant in American literature in the 1860s and early 1870s，it is defined by Hamlin Garland as having such quality of texture and background that it could not have been written in any other place or by anyone else than a native stories of local colorism have a quality of circumstantial(详细的) authenticity(确实性), as local colorists tried to immortalize(使不朽) the distinctive natural, social and linguistic features. It is characteristic of vernacular(本国语) language and satirical(讽刺的) humor3.Psychological Realism: James’s realism is characterized by his psychological a pproach to his subject matter. His fictional world is concerned more with the inner l ife of human beings than with overt human actions. His best and most mature wor ks will render the drama of individual consciousness and convey the moment-to-mo ment sense of human experience as bewilderment and discovery. And we observe people and events filtering through the individual consciousness and participate in h is experience. This emphasis on psychology and on the human consciousness prov es to be a big breakthrough in novel writing and has great influence on the comin g generations. James is generally regarded as the forerunner of the 20th century " stream-of-consciousness" novels and the founder of psychological realism.4.International theme:Henry James’s fame generally rests on his novels and stories with the international theme. These novels are always set against a large international background, usually between Europe and America, and centered on the confrontation of the two different cultures with two different groups of people representing two different value systems.The treatment of the international theme is characterized by the richness of syntax and characterization and the originality in point of view, symbolism, metaphoric texture, and organizing rhyme. James is now more mature as an artist, more at home in the craft of fiction.5. Modernism：It was a complex and diverse （复杂多样的）international movement in all the creative arts （创造性艺术），originating about the end of the 19th century. It provided （出现）the greatest creative renaissance of the 20th century. It was made up of many facets （方面），such as symbolism，surrealism （超现实主义），cubism （立体主义），expressionism，futurism （未来主义），ect6. American Realism: In American literature, the Civil War brought the Romantic Period to an end. The Age of Realism came into existence. It came as a reaction against the lie of romanticism and sentimentalism. Realism turned from an emphasis on the strange toward 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.7.Surrealism(超现实主义):An anti-rational movement of imaginative liberation in European in art and literature in the 1920s and 1930s, which launched by Andre Breton after his break from the Dada group in 1922. Surrealism seeks to break down the boundaries between rationality and irrationality, exploring the resources and revolutionary energies of dreams, hallucinations and sexual desire. Influenced both by the symbolists and by Sigmund Freud’s theories of the unconscious, the surrealists experimented with automatic writing and with the free association of random images brought in surprising juxtaposition.8. Naturalism: American naturalism was a new and harsher realism. American naturalism had been shaped by the war; by the social upheavals（剧变）that undermined the comforting faith of an earlier age. 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. Although naturalist literature described the world with sometimes brutal realism, it sometimes also aimed at bettering the world through social reform.9. Hemingway Code Hero(海明威式英雄): Hemingway Code Hero ,also called code hero, is one who, wounded but strong more sentitive, enjoys the pleasures of life( sex, alcohol, sport) in face of ruin and death, and maintains, through some notion of a code, an ideal of himself.2> barnes in the sun also Rises, henry in a Farewell to arms and santiago in the old man and the sea are typical of Hemingway Code Hero10.Iceberg Theory :Ernest Hemingway’s “iceberg theory”suggests that the writer include in the text only a small portion of what he knows, leaving about ninety percent of the content a mystery that grows beneath the surface of the writing. If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement ofan iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. A good writer does not need to reveal every detail of a character or action11.American Dream:American dream means the belief that everyone can succeed as long as he/she works hard enough. It usually implies a successful and satisfying life. It usually framed in terms of American capitalism（资本主义）, its associated purported meritocracy,（知识界精华）and the freedoms guaranteed by the U.S. Bill of Rights.12. Jazz age(爵士时代):The Jazz Age describes the period of the 1920s and 1930s, the years between world war I and world war II. Particularly in north America. With the rise of the great depression, the values of this age saw much decline. Perhaps the most representative literary work of the age is American writer Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. Highlighting what some describe as the decadence and hedonism, as well as the growth of individualism. Fitzgerald is largely credited wi th coining the term” Jazz Age”.（了解）13.Stream of consciousness（意识流）：It is one of the modern literary techniques. It is the style of writing that attempts to imitate the natural flow of a character’s thoughts, feelings, reflections, memories, and mental images as the character experiences them. It was first used in 1922 by the Irish novelist James Joyce. Those novels broke through the bounds of time and space, and depicted vividly and skillfully the unconscious activity of the mind fast changing and flowing incessantly。

southern writers名词解释美国文学南方文学（Southern Literature，The）这一文学流派形成于二十世纪二十年代，属一种美国文学倾向，以反映美国南方的风土人情为基本特征。

出了不少文学大师，其影响深远。

南方文学叙述传统从远甚至可以追溯到查尔斯•布罗克登和爱伦•坡那种哥特式作品。

爱伦•坡的创作实践使之成为了美国最早也是最为重要的南方作家之一。

爱伦•坡作品以阴暗为基本特色，他专门写梦、死亡与恶，是那个时代病态社会扭曲后的反映。

从二十年代开始，南方出版文学团体创办了不少的刊物，在诗歌、戏剧、小说以及文艺批评方面大量涌现代表性人物。

其中，一些作家先后形成“逃亡者”集团、重农派和“新批评家”，形成了一股巨大影响力。

南方作家取材大多数直接来自于南方的历史、事件，现实社会、经济困境，包括了作者故乡的神话和家庭以及祖辈的生存、生活。

暴力倾向、恐怖故事、战争经历、人情世故、风物、传说、道德沦陷及社会腐败都是他们常表现的主题。

南方文学毫无疑问继承了美国的浪漫主义文学传统并发扬光大。

其艺术风格、特色鲜明，主要在以下几个方面：一.心理描写细腻、深刻，往往采用意识流手法。

人物回忆、期待、内省、梦幻、欲望交织，时空经验错综复杂，身体感觉直击灵魂。

二.艺术氛围强烈、浓郁，有时候借助哥特式手法，大量描写背景、神秘现象，气氛阴森，大费周折渲染恐怖与暴力，从而烘托故事本身，极大地增强了艺术效果，令读者震撼。

其浓厚生活气息与独特的南方情调和风光使作品更具有感染力。

三.艺术风格怪诞不经。

事件背景色彩斑斓，人物畸形病态，叙述上颠倒时空关系，不断转换叙事角度，突破语法限制等等，对文学常规的打破以及叙述者把并不相容的事物并置所形成的张力，都是形成这种风格的因素。

威廉•福克纳被公认是南方文学最伟大的代表作家并获诺贝尔文学奖。

他的作品描写南方古老家族的衰败和北方工业势力在南方的兴起，并展现出一种特别复杂世态，刻划了形形色色的人物，对二十世纪的世界文学产生了完全绕不过去的巨大影响。

名词解释1.Impressionism(印象主义)Briefly, it is a style of literature characterized by the creation of general impressions and moods rather than realistic mood.2.American Realism (1865-1914)Realism was a reaction against Romanticism or a move away from the bias towards romance and self-creating fictions, and paved the way to Modernism. (书上P471 第一段)3.American Naturalism(自然主义）已改啦Naturalism is evolved from realism when the author’s tone in writing becomes less serious and less sympathetic but more ironic and more pessimistic. It is no more than a gloomy philosophical approach to reality, or to human existence. (书P476 第一段最后)4.Local colorism释义1：Local colorism as a trend became dominant in American literature in the 1860s and early 1870s，it is defined by Hamlin Garland as having such quality of texture and background that it could not have been written in any other place or by anyone else than a native. Stories of local colorism have a quality of circumstantial(详细的) authenticity(确实性), as local colorists tried to immortalize(使不朽) the distinctive natural, social and linguistic features. It is characteristic of vernacular(本国语) language and satirical(讽刺的) humor.释义2：Local colorism is a trend first made its presence felt in the late 1860s and early 1870s in America. It may be defined as the careful attention in speech, dress or behavior peculiar to a geographical locality.释义3：Local colorism is fiction and poetry that focuses on the characters, dialect, customs, topography, and other features particular to a specific region.5.The Lost generation释义1：It refers to a group of young intellectuals who came back from war，were injured both physically and mentally. Disillusioned and disgusted by the frivolous, greedy, and heedless way of life in America, they began to write and they wrote from their own experiences in the war. The best representative of the lost generation was Ernest Hemingway. (书P547)释义2：The lost generation is a term first used by Stein to describe the post-war I generation who are physically and psychologically scarred. (书P548)6.Imagism:释义1：It’s a poetic movement of England and the U.S. 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.释义2：Imagism came into being in Britain and U.S around 1910 as a reaction to the traditional English poetry to express the sense of fragmentation and dislocation.7.Free verseFree verse is poetry without a fixed beat or regular rhyme scheme.A looser and more open-ended syntactical structure is frequently favored. Whiteman’s poetry is an example of free verse at its most impressive.8.Transcendentalism:Transcendentalism is a philosophic and literary movement.It is a reaction against Rationalism and Calvinism. It appeared after 1830, marked the maturity of American Romanticism and the first Renaissance in the American literary history.9.Jazz AgeJazz age describe the period of 1920s and 1930s, the years between WW1 and WW2. With the rise of the Great Depression, the values of theage saw much decline. The most representative literature work is The Great Gatsby highlighting what some describe as the decadence and hedonism, as well as the growth of individualism.10.I ceberg Principle ：It is a term used to describe the writing style of American writer Ernest Hemingway. The meaning of a piece is not immediately evident, because the crux of the story lies below the surface, just as most of the mass of a real iceberg similarly lies beneath the surface.11.M odernism(现代主义)：Modernism is comprehensive but vague term for a movement, which began in the late 19th century and which has had a wide influence internationally during much of the 20th century. It is a reaction against realism. It rejects rationalism, which is the theoretical base of realism.12.O riginal sinThe wrong doing of one generation lives into the successive ones. Human beings are basically depraved and corrupted, hence, they should obey God to atone for their sins.13.P sychological Realism(心理现实主义)It is the realistic writing that probes deeply into the complexities of characters’ thoughts and motivations. Henry James is considered the founder of psychological realism. His novel The Ambassadors is considered to be a masterpiece of psychological realism.14.C olloquialismA colloquialism is a word, phrase or paralanguage that is employed in conversational or informal language but not in formal speech or formal writing.In a word, naturalism is evolved from realism when the author’s tone in writing becomes less serious and less sympathetic but more ironic and more pessimistic.。

美国古代文学史名词解释、简答、论述题本文旨在阐述美国古代文学发展史中的重要名词、简述相关内容及针对论述题展开适当讨论。

一、名词解释1. Puritanism（清教主义）：是17世纪时在英格兰和美洲流行的宗教改革运动。

清教徒最初移民纽英格兰是为了逃避英王的压迫。

清教徒的中包括坚信的意志对人的一切事宜具有决定性作用，反对世俗和欲望，鼓励个人的努力，强调个人的责任以及间接地强调了民主的概念。

2. Transcendentalism（超验主义）：是19世纪30年代美国文化中一股对启蒙运动的反动，反对理性主义和经验主义。

超验主义者认为人们应该依靠个人直觉和灵感开启心灵深处的真实，超越感官经验。

超验主义者强调个人的自由发展，自然的神秘和美好。

3. Regionalism（地方主义）：是19世纪晚期至20世纪初美国文学的一种流派。

运动的核心思想是反对现代工业化和全球化，提倡重视地方风景、文化和民俗，关注本土的人、事、物，并以此为原材料创作文学。

二、简答题1. Nathaniel Hawthorne的小说《红字》反映了哪些思想和文化特征？《红字》十分典型地表现了清教徒文化对美国文学的影响，其中包括对罪恶的强烈谴责和对个人自由的崇尚。

小说中的同情感是从人性中萃取出来的，同时还揭示了社会伦理和人性的冲突。

2. 简要说明Mark Twain的《哈克贝利·费恩历险记》中的重要主题。

《哈克贝利·费恩历险记》中最为重要的主题之一是反对奴隶制度和种族歧视。

小说通过边缘化非洲裔角色吉姆和他与哈克贝利的冒险来表达这一主题。

通过小说中的观点发表间接批判制奴政策和对黑人的压迫。

三、论述题威廉·福克纳的小说《荒野上的救世主》中如何体现了超验主义思想？《荒野上的救世主》小说通过多个角色的人生经历，呈现出一种东西方的宗教信仰和精神世界上的共性。

超验主义的思想在小说中得到了体现，例如鲍姆对科学和机械世界的愤恨，以及詹妮·霍查神秘的形象等等。

美国文学史名词解释Romanticism1. The American Romanticism covers the first half of the 19th century。

2. American Romanticism was both imitative and independent. Some of American romantic writing was modeled on English and European works. While it was in essence the expression of “a real new experience” and contained “an alien quality” for the simple reason that “the spirit of the place” was radically new and alien。

3。

The American national experience of “pioneering” into the west proved to be a rich fund of material for American writers to draw upon。

4。

The “newness” of the Americans as a nation is another major element connected with American Romanticism. Their ideals of individualism and political equality, and their dream that America was to be a new Garden of Eden for man were distinctly American. 5。

In technique they loved traditional meters and stanza forms； in language their English was usually British.6。

Stream of consciousness(意识流)(or interior monologue);In literary criticism, Stream of consciousness denotes a literary technique which seeks to describe an individual’s point of view by giving the written equivalent of the character’s thought processes. Stream of consciousness writing is strongly associated with the modernist movement. Its introduction in the literary context, transferred from psychology, is attributed to May Sinclair. Stream of consciousness writing is usually regarded as a special form of interior monologue and is characterized by associative leaps in syntax and punctuation that can make the prose difficult to follow,tracing as they do a character’s fragmentary thoughts and sensory feelings.famous writers to employ this technique in the english language include James Joyce and William Faulkner.American realism ：（美国现实主义）Realism was a reaction against Romanticism and paved the way to Modernism;2).During this period a new generation of writers, dissatisfied with the Romantic ideas in the older generation, came up witha new inspiration. This new attitude was characterized by a great interest in the realities of life. It aimed at the interpretation of the realities of any aspect of life, free from subjective prejudice, idealism, or romantic color. Instead of thinking about the mysteries of life and death and heroic individualism, people’s attention was now directed to the interesting features of everyday existence, to what was brutal or sordid, and to the open portayal of class struggle;3) so writers began to describe the integrity of human characters reacting under various circumstances and picture the pioneers of the far west, the new immigrants and the struggles of the working class; 4) Mark Twain Howells and Henry James are three leading figures of the American Realism.American Naturalism(美国自然主义文学)：The American naturalists accepted the more negative interpretation of Darwin’s evolutionary theory and used it to accout for the behavior of those characters in literary works who were regarded as more or less complex combinations of inherited attributes, their habits conditioned by social and economic forces.2) naturalism is evolved from realism when the author’s tone in writing becomes less serious and less sympathetic but more ironic and more pessimistic. It is no more than a gloomy philosophical approach to reality, or to human existence.3>Dreiser is a leading figure of his school.Local Colorism(乡土文学)：Generally speaking, the writings of local colorists are concerned with the life of a small, weell-defined region or province. The characteristic setting is the isolated small town. 2) Local colorists were consciously nostalgic historians of a vanishing way of life, recorders of a present that faded before their eyes. Yet for all their sentimentality, they dedicated themselves to minutely accurate descriptions of the life of their regions, they worked from personal experience to record the facts of a local environment and suggested that the native life was shaped by the curious conditions of the local. 3) major local colorists is Mark Twain.Imagism(意象主义)：Imagism came into being in Britain and U.S around 1910 as a reaction to the traditional English poetry to express the sense of fragmentation and dislocation.2>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.3>imagism is characterized by the following three poetic principles:A.direct treatment of subject matter;B.economy of expression;C. as regards rhythm ,to compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in the sequence of metronome. 4> pound’s In a Station of the Metro is a well-known inagist poem.The Lost Generation(迷惘的一代）：The lost generation is a term first used by Stein to describe the post-war I generation of American writers:men and women haunted by a sense of betrayal and emptiness brought about by the destructiveness of the war.2>full of youthful idealism, these individuals sought the meaning of life, drank excessively, had love affairs and created some of the finest American literature to date.3>the three best-known representatives of lost generation are F.Scott Fitzgerald, hemingway and John dos Passos.The Beat Generation(垮掉的一代):The members of The Beat Generation were new bohemian libertines. Who engaged in a spontaneous, sometimes messy, creativity.2> The Beat writers produced a body of written work controversial both for its advocacy of non-conformity and for its non-conforming style.3> the major beat writings are Allen Ginsberg’s howl.Howl became the manifesto of The Beat Generation.A J azz age(爵士时代):The Jazz Age describes the period of the 1920s and 1930s, the years between world war I and worldwar II. Particularly in north America. With the rise of the great depression, the values of this age saw much decline. Perhaps the most representative literary work of the age is American writer Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. Highlighting what some describe as the decadence and hedonism, as well as the growth of individualism. Fitzgerald is largely credited with coining the term” Jazz Age”.Feminisim(女权主义): Feminisim incorporates both a doctrine of equal rights for women and an ideology of social transformation aiming to create a world for women beyond simple social equality.2>in general, feminism is ideology of women’s liberation based on th e belief that women suffer injustice because of their sex. Under this broad umbrella various feminisms offer differing analyses of the causes, or agents, of female oppression.3> definitions of feminism by feminists tend to be shaped by their training, ideology or race. So, for example, Marxist and socialist feminists stress the interaction within feminism of class with gender and focus on social distinctions between men and women. Black feminists argue much more for an integrated analysis which can unlock the multiple systems of oppression.Hemingway Code Hero(海明威式英雄): Hemingway Code Hero ,also called code hero, is one who, wounded but strong more sentitive, enjoys the pleasures of life( sex, alcohol, sport) in face of ruin and death, and maintains, through some notion of a code, an ideal of himself.2> barnes in the sun also Rises, henry in a Farewell to arms and santiago in the old man and the sea are typical of Hemingway Code HeroImpressionism(印象主义):Impressionism is a style of painting that gives the impression made by the subject on the artist without much attention to details. Writers accepted the same conviction that the personal attitudes and moods of the writer were legitimate elements in depicting character or setting or action.2>briefly, it is a style of literature characterized by the creation of general impressions and moods rather that realistic mood.Modernism(现代主义)：Modernism is comprehensive but vague term for a movement , which begin in the late 19th century and which has had a wide influence internationally during much of the 20th century.2> modernism takes the irrational philosophy and the theory of psycho-analysis as its theoretical case.3> the term pertains to all the creative arts. Especially poetry, fiction, drama, painting,music and architecture.4> in england from early in the 20th century and during the 1920s and 1930s, in America from shortly before the first world war and on during the inter-war period, modernist tendencies were at their most active and fruitful.5>as far as literature is concerned, Modernism reveals a breaking away from established rules, traditions and conventions.fresh way s of looking at man’s position and function in the universe and many experiments in form and style.it is particularly concerned with language and how to use it and with writing itself.the gilded age: Plains Indians were pushed in a series of Indian wars onto restricted reservations.This period also witnessed the creation of a modern industrial economy. A national transportation and communication network was created, the corporation became the dominant form of business organization, and a managerial revolution transformed business operations. By the beginning of the twentieth century, per capita income and industrial production in the United States exceeded that of any other country except Britain. Long hours and hazardous working conditions, led many workers to attempt to form labor unions despite strong opposition from industrialists and the courts.An era of intense political partisanship, the Gilded Age was also an era of reform. The Civil Service Act sought to curb government corruption by requiring applicants for certain governmental jobs to take a competitive examination. The Interstate Commerce Act sought to end discrimination by railroads against small shippers and the Sherman Antitrust Act outlawed business monopolies. These years also saw the rise of the Populist crusade. Burdened by heavy debts and falling farm prices, many farmers joined the Populist party, which called for an increase in the amount of money in circulation, government assistance to help farmers repay loans, tariff reductions, and a graduated income tax.Mark Twain called the late nineteenth century the "Gilded Age." By this, he meant that the period was glittering on the surface but corrupt underneath. In the popular view, the late nineteenth century was a period of greed and guile: of rapacious Robber Barons, unscrupulous speculators, and corporate buccaneers, of shady business practices, scandal-plagued politics, and vulgar display. It is easy to caricature the Gilded Age as an era of corruption, conspicuous consumption, and unfettered capitalism. But it is more useful to think of this as modern America’s formative period, when an agrarian society of small producers was transformed into an urban society dominated byindustrial corporations.Regionalism(地区主义)：In literature, regionalism or local color fiction refers to fiction or poetry that focuses on specific features –including characters, dialects, customs, history, and topography –of a particular region. Since the region may be a recreation or reflection of the author's own, there is often nostalgia and sentimentality in the writing.Although the terms regionalism and local color are sometimes used interchangeably, regionalism generally has broader connotations. Whereas local color is often applied to a specific literary mode that flourished in the late 19th century, regionalism implies a recognition from the colonial period to the present of differences among specific areas of the country. Additionally, regionalism refers to an intellectual movement encompassing regional consciousness beginning in the 1930s. Even though there is evidence of regional awareness in early southern writing—William Byrd's History of the Dividing Line, for example, points out southern characteristics—not until well into the 19th century did regional considerations begin to overshadow national ones. In the South the regional concern became more and more evident in essays and fiction exploring and often defending the southern way of life. John Pendleton Kennedy's fictional sketches in Swallow Barn, for example, examined southern plantation life at length.multiple points of view（多视角）：Multiple Point of View: It is one of the literary techniques William Faulkner used, which shows within the same story how the characters reacted differently to the same person or the same situation. The use of this technique gave the story a circular form wherein one event was the center, with various points of view radiating from it. The multiple points of view technique makes the reader recognize the difficulty of arriving at a true judgment.Confessional poetry ：Confessional poetry emphasizes the intimate, and sometimes unflattering, information about details of the poet's personal life, such as in poems about illness, sexuality, and despondence. The confessionalist label was applied to a number of poets of the 1950s and 1960s. John Berryman, Allen Ginsberg, Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, Theodore Roethke, Anne Sexton, and William De Witt Snodgrass have all been called 'Confessional Poets'. As fresh and different as the work of these poets appeared at the time, it is also true that several poets prominent in the canon of Western literature, perhaps most notably Sextus Propertius and Petrarch, could easily share the label of "confessional" with the confessional poets of the fifties and sixties.Ecocriticism：Ecocriticism is the study of literature and environment from an interdisciplinary point of view where all sciences come together to analyze the environment and brainstorm possible solutions for the correction of the contemporary environmental situation. Ecocriticism was officially heralded by the publication of two seminal works, both published in the mid-1990s: The Ecocriticism Reader, edited by Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm, and The Environmental Imagination, by Lawrence Buell.In the United States, Ecocriticism is often associated with the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE), which hosts biennial meetings for scholars who deal with environmental matters in literature. ASLE has an official journal—Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment (ISLE)—in which much of the most current American scholarship in the rapidly evolving field of ecocriticism can be found.Ecocriticism is an intentionally broad approach that is known by a number of other designations, including "green (cultural) studies", "ecopoetics", and "environmental literary criticism".Dramatic Conflict：At least not the special kind of conflict that drives plays, the gas that fuels the dramatic engine. Arguments in real life are usually circular -- nobody gets anywhere, except a little steam's been blown off. And they're boring for everyone except the folks doing the yelling.Dramatic Conflict draws from a much deeper vein, rooted in the Subtext of your central characters. It's driven by fundamentally opposing desires.Conflict is a necessary element of fictional literature. It is defined as the problem in any piece of literature and is often classified according to the nature of the protagonist or antagonist。

1、puritan thought:i : to make pure their religious beliefs and practicesii: wish to restore simplicity to church services and the authority of the Bibleiii: 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 hardiiiii: 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 GenerationAfter 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 beentried before.)4、The Southern LiteratureThe 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 LiteratureIt 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 “Jewish writers”though they were from Jewish family ,but Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, Isaac Bashevis Singer are often identified as the representatives of Jewish Literature in US, for they habitually write from a Jewish point of view and usually choose Jew as the heroes of their books. The most important element in their point of view is the emphasis which Jew place upon the power of intellect 智力. The power to understand their own experience , to judge their lives rationally, to think well , is considered a high virtue.6、The Feminist LiteratureEducated women in US took an active part in the Anti-Slavery Movement. The two World Wars produced a demand for labor which again changed the role of women. But educated women still found their positions are lower than that of men’s in many walks of life, which gave rise to the Women’s Liberation. Serious women writers of the 1960’s and 1970”s have been influenced by the philosophy of the Women’s Lib, whether they took part in it or not . As a group , they are no longer willing to accept the traditional roles of women; they are self-conscious, determined pathfinders开创者in a society. Present-day women’s writing goes from political essays to high sensitive , pessimistic, even suicidal poetry . Gloria Steinem, Joyce Carol Oates , and Sylvia Plath are the three of best-known.7、The Beat GenerationIn the middle of the 1950’s, a group of writers in San Francisco put on a concerted商定的and well-publicized rebellion against “official”American life and culture. Jack Kerouac, a novelist, named the group Beat . The Beat Movement was a revolt against the frightened, conservative political mood, against the greedy, money-seeking “respectable”life of the dominant middle class and particularly against the literary formalism of American writing after the Second World War. The Beats read their outrageously critical poetry to the public in the coffee house and bars . They adopted an “unrespectable”way of life, growing their hair and bears very long, deliberately remaining poor and dressing like paupers, living in an unconventional and undisciplined way, and even smoking “pot” . They evolved a free , non-materialistic religion with no formal church, based loosely on the teachings of Buddha佛, comprising包含love , joy and anarchy无政府状态 . In rejecting the carefully written works of their contemporary writers, the Beats instead wanted to write with complete spontaneity自发性and honesty诚实, even if the effect was slap-dash匆促的. They wanted to express emotion “raw”处于自然状态，未加工的, exactly as it was felt, rather than “cooked”through memory and translation into art, which can be said as “counter-culture”. Unfortunately , the ideal became very degenerate退化的in practice. The leaders of “Beats”were poet Allen Ginsberg and novelist Jack Kerouac.8、The Black HumorThe term “Black Humor”was created in 1920’s ,but it was not noticed until 1960’s. It was particularly a literary phenomenon in America. Facing the absurd 荒诞and madness疯狂in the world , some sensitive intellectuals feel to have no alternative but to express their discontentment不满, anger and despair with the technique of self-mockery自嘲and humor. Black Humor often expresses a tragedy in the form of comedy to explore the oppression of the society . The heroes in the works of “black humor”are anti-heroic 反英雄full of suspicion and negation ,madness as well as holiness. Josegh Heller and Kurt Vonnegut are famous for their novels of “Black Humor”.9、The Black Literature ( Afro-American Literature )The Black Literature has developed with political movements as The Civil Rights Movement, Black Liberation Movement. In the 19th century appeared some outstanding writers as well as politicians. Harlem Renaissance in the 20’s of 20th century from the black community in Harlem was a cultural movement which took the reflection of the black culture as its responsibility and from which the figures of the New Negro came into being in American literature . Those New Negroes , independent , active ,and full of the pride of their race, have tried to create new idea of value and image of life for the Afro-American. In the 40’s of 20th century , the literary works by Negroes was no longer ignored and now Afro-American literature with some famous black writers as Langston Hughes , Richard Wright ,Ralph Ellison ,Toni Morrison who has just got the Noble Price , has become an important part of American Literature.10、Imagisma movement of poets who used ordinary but image-laden language, not poetic diction. The Imagists followed three principles:(1)“Direct treatment”The subject of poem must be expressed in such a way as toresemble象，类似it and reproduce it as closely as possible. Simple language must be used to create an “image”, which the reader can immediately see his own imagination.(2)“Economy of expression”No word must be used which does not contributedirectly to the image.(3)“Rhythm节奏，韵律”No unnecessary words may be included in order to makemeter or a rhyme韵. A poem should be composed with the phrasing of music, nota metronome节拍器 .11、The iceberg冰山principle:It is a principle that Hemingway usually abided by in his work. The phenomenon that an iceberg moving in the sea for only one third of it is on the surface of water with two third under it is consistent with the way of Hemingway’s writing in his work. Hemingway kept this principle and to embraced significant meaning 内涵with few words. Thus is formed his literary style :simplicity and economy of expression as a way to reach the goal; short , uncomplicated active sentences with very few adjectives to immerse使…陷入his readers in a “continuous present”.。

美国文学重要名词解释American Romanticism(l)American Romanticism is one of the most important periods in the history of American literature. (2)It was a rebellion against the objectivity of rationalism. For romantics, the feelings, intuitions andemotions were more important than reason and common sense. They emphasized individualism, placing the individual against the group. They affirmed the inner life of the self, and cherished strong interest in the past ，the wild，the remote，the mysterious and the strange. They stressed the element “Americanness” in their works.(3)It started with the publication of Washington Irving,s The Sketch Book and ended with Walt Whitman,sLeaves of Grass.(4)Being a period of the great flowering of American literature, it is also called “the AmericanRenaissance. ”(5)American Romanticists include such literary figures as Washington Irving , Ralph Waldo Emerson, HenryDavid Thoreau, William Cullen Bryant, Henry Wordsworth Longfellow, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allen Poe, Herman Melville. Walt Whitman and some others.Transcendentalism(1)It refers to the religious and philosophical doctrines of Ralph Waldo Emerson and others in NewEngland in the middle 18005s, which emphasized the importance of individual inspiration and intuition, the Over-soul, and Nature. Other concepts that accompanied Transcendentalism include the idea that nature is ennobling and the idea that the individual is divine and，therefore，self-reliant.(2)New England Transcendentalism is the product of a combination of native American Puritanism and EuropeanRomanticism.3.Free Verse(1)Free verse means the rhymed or unrhymed poetry composed without paying attention to conventional rulesof meter.(2)Free verse was originated by a group of French poets of the late 19th century.(3)Their purpose was to free themselves from the restrictions of formal metrical patterns and to recreateinstead the free rhythms of natural speech.(4)Walt Whitman,s Leaves of Grass is, perhaps, the most notable example.4.Symbol(1)Symbol means an act, a person, a thing, or a spectacle that stands for something else , usuallysomething less palpable than the named symbol.(2)The relationship between the symbol and its referent is not often one of simple equivalence. Allegoricalsymbols usually express a neater equivalence with what they stand for than the symbols found in modern realistic fiction.5.Theme(1)Theme means the unifying point or general idea Of a literary work.(2)It provides an answer to such question as “What is the work about?”(3)Each literary work carries its own theme or themes. For example, King Lear has many themes, amongwhich are blindness and madness6.American Naturalism(1)The American naturalists accepted the more negative interpretation of Darwin's evolutionary theory andused it to account for the behavior of those characters in literary works who were regarded as more or less complex combinations of inherited attributes, their habits conditioned by social and economic forces.(2)American Naturalism is evolved from realism when the author,s ton e in writing becomes less serious andless sympathetic but more ironic and more pessimistic. It is no more than a gloomy philosophical approach to reality, or to human existence.(3)Dreiser is a leading figure of his school.7.Darwinism(1)Darwinism is a term that comes from Charles Darwin,s evolutionary theory.(2)Darwinists think that those who survive in the world are the fittest and those who fail to adaptthemselves to the environment will perish.They believe that man has evolved from lower forms of life.Humans are special not because God created them in His image, but because they have successfully adapted to changing environmental conditions and have passed on their survival.making characteristics genetically.(3)Influenced by this theory, some American naturalist writers apply Darwinism as an explanation of humannature and social reality.8.Local Colorists(1)Generally speaking, the writings of local colorists are concerned with the life of a small, well-defined region or province. The characteristic setting is the isolated small town.(2)Local colorists were consciously nostalgic historians of a vanishing way of life, recorders of a presentthat faded before their eyes. Yet for all their sentimentality, they dedicated themselves to minutely accurate descriptions of the life of their regions. They worked from personal experience to record the facts of a local environment and suggested that the native life was shaped by the curious conditions of the Locale.(3)Major local colorists include Hamlin Garland, Mark Twain, Kate Chopin, etc.9.The Lost Generation(1)The Lost Generation is a term first used by Gertrude Stein to describe the post-World War Igeneration of American writers ：men and women haunted by a sense of betrayal and emptiness brought about by the destructiveness of the war．(2)Full of youthful idealism, these individuals sought the meaning of life, drank excessively, had loveaffairs and created some of the finest American literature to date．(3)The three best ——known representatives of Lost Generation are F Scott Fitzgerald . Ernest Hemingwayand John Dos Passos.(4)Others usually included among the list are Sherwood Anderson, Kay Boyle, Hart Crane, Ford MaddoxFord and Zelda Fitzgerald.10.Imagism(1)Imagism came into being in Britain and U. S. around 1910 as a reaction to the traditional Englishpoetry to express the sense of fragmentation and dislocation.(2)The imagists．with Ezra Pound leading the way, hold that the most effective means to express thesemomentary impressions is through the use of one dominant image．(3)Imagism is characterized by the following three poetic principles ：i1 direct treatment of subjectmatter；ii)economy of expression；iii)as regards rhythm, to compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in the sequence of metronome.(4)Ezra Pound's In a Station of the Metro is a well-known imagist poem.11.The Beat Generation(1)The members of the Beat Generation were new bohemian libertines, who engaged in aspontaneous,sometimes messy, creativity．(2)The beat writers produced a body of written work controversial both for its advocacy of non—conformityand for its non——conforming style.(3)The major beat writings are Jack Kerouac,s On the Road and AIlen Ginsberg,s Howl. Howl became themanifesto of the Beat Generation．12.American Dream(1)American Dream refers to the dream of material success, in which one, regard1ess of socialstatus,acquires wealth and gains success by working hard and good luck．(2)In literature, the theme of American Dream recurs . In The Great Gatsby. Gatsby comes from the west to the east with the dream of material success. By bootlegging and other illegal means he fulfilled his dream but ended up being killed. The novel tells the shattering of American Dream rather than its Success.13.Expressionism(1)Expressionism refers to a movement in Germany early in the 20th century, in which a number of painters sought to avoid the representation of external reality and ， instead, to project a highly personal or subjective vision of the world.(2)Expressionism is a reaction against realism or naturalism , aiming at presenting a post 一war world violently distorted. (3)Works noted for expressionism include：Eugene O' Neill's The Emperor Jones，James Joyce’s Ulysses and Finnegan,s Wake, and T S . Eliot,s The Waste Land, etc.. (4)In a further sense， the term is sometimes applied to the belief that literary works are essentially expressions of their authors, moods and thoughts；this has been the dominant assumption about literature since the rise of Romanticism14.Feminism(1)Feminism incorporates both a doctrine of equal rights for women and an ideology of social transformation aiming to create a world for women beyond simple social equality.(2)In general, feminism is the ideology of women,s liberation based on the belief that women suffer injustice because of their sex . Under this broad umbrella various feminisms offer differing analyses of the causes,or agents,of female oppression．(3)Definitions of feminism by feminists tend to be shaped by their training, ideology or race. So, for example, Marxist and Socialist feminists stress the interaction within feminism of class with gender and focus on social distinctions between men and women.Black feminists argue much more for an integrated analysis which can unlock the multiple systems of oppression.15.Hemingway Code Hero(1)Hemingway Hero, also called code hero, is one who, wounded but strong, more sensitive, enjoys the pleasures of life (sex, alcohol, sport) in face of ruin and death, and maintains, through some notion of a code, an ideal of himself.(2)Barnes in The Sun Also Rises, Henry in A Farewell to Arms and Santiago in The Old Man and the Sea aretypical of Hemingway Hero.16.Harlem Renaissance(1)Harlem Renaissance refers to a period of outstanding literary vigor and creativity thatoccurred in the United States during the 1920s.(2)The, Harlem Renaissance changed the images of literature created by many black and white American writers .New black images were no longer obedient and docile ， instead they showed a new confidence and racial pride.(3)The center of this movement was the vast black ghetto of Harlem, in New York City. (4)The leadingfigures are Langston Hughes, James Weldon Johnson, Wallace Thurman, etc..17.Impressionism(1)Impressionism is a style of painting that gives the impression made by the subject on the artist without much attention to details.Writers accepted the same conviction that the personal attitudes and moods of the writer were legitimate elements in depicting character or setting or action.(2)Briefly, it is a style of literature characterized by the creation of general impressions and moods rather than realistic moods.18.Puritanism(1)Puritanism refers to the practices and beliefs of the Puritans. The Puritans are the people who wantedto purify the Church of England and was persecuted in England. The first settlers who became the founding father of the American nation were quite a few of them Puritans. They came to America out of various reasons, but because they were a group of serious and religious people, they carried a code of values, a philosophy of life, a point of view which, in time took root in the New World, and became what is popularly known as American Puritanism.(2)The American Puritans, like their brothers back in England, were idealists, believing that the Churchshould be restored to “purity” of the first century Church. To them religion was a matter of primary importance. They accepted the doctrine of predestination, original sin and total depravity, and limited atonement through a special infusion of grace from God. It was this kind of religious belief that they brought with them into the wilderness. There they meant to prove that they were God ’s chosen people enjoying His blessings on this earth as in heaven.(3)In the grim struggle for survival that followed immediately after their arrival in America, thecharacter of the people underwent a significant change. They became more practical, as indeed they had to be. Gradually a set of Puritan values came into being. They believe in hard working, piety, and sobriety.(4)In a word, American Puritanism was one of the most enduring shaping influences in American thoughtand American literature. It has become, to some extent, a state of mind,rather than a set of tenets, so much a part of the national cultural atmosphere that the American breathes.We can say that, without some understanding of Puritanism, there can be no real understanding of America and its literature.19.Gothic RomanceIt refers to the Romantic novels with the settings of the ancient castles or old houses and descriptions of supernatural elements like ghosts and specters, usually horror-provoking, like Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher” and some of Irving,s tales.20.Psychological RealismIt is the realistic writing that probes deeply into the complexities of characters , thoughts and motivations. Henry James, novel The Ambassadorsis considered to be a masterpiece of psychological realism.And Henry James is considered the founder of psychological realism. He believed that reality lies in the impressions made by life on the spectator, and not in any facts of which the spectator is unaware. Such realism is therefore merely the obligation that the artist assumes to represent life as he sees it, which may not be the same life as it “really” is.21.Waste Land Painters“Waste Land Painters” refers to such writers as F. Scott Fitzgerald, T.S. Eliot, Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner. With their writings, all of them painted the postwar Western world as a waste land, lifeless and hopeless. Eliot,s The Waste Land paints a picture of modern social crisis. In this poem, modern civilized society turns into a waste deathly land due to ethical degradation and disillusionment with dreams. His aThe Hollow Men” exhibited a pessimism no less depressing than The Wa ste Land.Fitzgerald,s The Great Gatsby wrote about the frustration and despair resulting from the failure of the American dream. Hemingway,s works, such as The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms, portrayed the dilemma of modern man utterly thrown upon himself for survival in an indifferent world, revealing man's impotence and his despairing courage to assert himself against overwhelming odds. Faulkner made the history of the Deep South the subject of the bulk of his work, and created a symbolic picture of the remote past. His fictional Yoknapatwpha represents a microcosm of the whole macrocosmic nature of human experience.22.ConflictThe conflict in a work of fiction is the battle that the main character must wage against an opposing force. Usually the events of the story are all related to the conflict, and theconflict is resolved in some way by the story,s end.A battle with nature is a common conflict in literature, particularly Naturalist literature. Othercommon types are conflict between two characters; conflict between a character and the laws of society;conflict between a character and chance or fate; the inner conflict, in which a character struggles with personal weakness, illusions, or desires.23.StyleBroadly speaking, style is the way a literary work is created of a writer writes his literary works.In a narrow sense it refers to the typical linguistic feature and specific literary techniques and devices for a literary work or a writer.24.Point of viewThe angle from which a story or a novel is written is the point of view. Generally speaking, fiction is written in the omniscient point of view, the third person point of view or the first-person point of view.25.Black HumorOriginally it refers to a type of course humor in which tragic events like death and serious wounds are made fun of. In American literature it refers to the novels which employ this type of humor.26.The Jazz AgeTo many, World War I was a tragic failure of old values, of old politics, of old ideas. The social mood was often one of confusion and despair. Yet, on the surface the mood in American during the 1920s did not seem desperate. Instead, Americans entered a decade of prosperity and exhibitionism that prohibition, the legal ban against alcoholic beverages, ded more to encourage than to curb. Fashions were extravagant; More and more automobiles crowded the roads, advertising flourished; and nearly every American home had a radio in it. Fads swept the nation. People danced the Charleston, and they sat upon the flagpoles. This was t he Jazz Age, when New Orleans musicians moved “up the river” to Chicago and the theater of New York,s Harlem pulsed with the music that had become a symbol of the times. These were the Roaring Twenties. The roaring of the decade served to mask a quiet pain, the sense of loss that Gertrude Stein had observed in Paris. F. Scott Fitzgerald portrays the Jazz Age as a generation of “the beautiful and damned”, drowning in their pleasures.。

美国文学名词解释《美国文学》名词解释1. American PuritanismAmerican Puritanism was one of the most enduring shaping influences in American thought and American literature. It has become, to some extent, so much a state of mind, rather than a set of tenets, so much a part of the national cultural atmosphere that the Americans breathe. It stresses predestination, original sin, total depravity, and limited atonement (or the salvation of a selected fe w) from God’s grac e. With such doctrines in their minds, Puritans left Europe for America in order to establish a theocracy in the New World. Over the years in the new homeland they built a way of life that stressed hard work, thrift, piety, and sobriety.2. The American DreamThe American Dream 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 a measure of success and/or happiness.3. American RomanticismAmerican Romanticism stretches from the end of the 18th century through the outbreak of the Civil War. It was America’s first great creative period. Although foreign influences were strong, American romanticism exhibited distinct features of its own. First, American romanticism was in essence the expressionof “a real new experience” and contained “an alien quality” for the simple reason that “the spirit of the place” was radically new and alien. Second, Puritan influence over American romanticism was conspicuously noticeable. Famous writers, such as the novelists Hawthorne and Melville; the poets Dickinson and Whitman; the essayists Thoreau and Emerson, had made a great literary period by capturing on their pages the enthusiasm and the optimism of that dream.4. American TranscendentalismAmerican Transcendentalism is literature, philosophical and literary movement that flourished in New England from about 1836 to 1860. It originated among a small group of intellectuals who were reacting against the orthodoxy of Calvinism and the rationalism of the Unitarian Church, developing instead their own faith centering on the divinity of humanity and the natural world. The beliefs that God is imminent in each person and in nature and that individual intuition is the highest source of knowledge led to an optimistic emphasis on individualism, self-reliance, and rejection of traditional authority. The ideas of transcendentalism were most eloquently expressed by Ralph Waldo Emerson in such essays as Nature(1836), and Self-Reliance and by Henry David Thoreau in his book Walden (1854).5. American NaturalismAmerican Naturalism is a literary movement that became popular in America in the late 19th century and is often associated with literary realism. Viewed as a combination of realism and romanticism, critics contend that the American form is heavily influenced by the concept of determinism—the theory that heredity and environment influence and determine human behavior. Although naturalism is often associated with realism,which also seeks to accurately represent human existence, the two movements are differentiated by the fact that naturalism is connected to the doctrine of biological, economic and social determinism. Representative writers are, among others, Stephen Crane and Theodore Dreiser.6. International ThemeThe International theme was one of Henry James’s main subjects, which dealt with the relationship between American and European culture. He explored the attractions and conflicts between new and old, innocence and experience, candor and complexity, the puritanical and the aesthetic.7. Local ColorismLocal Colorism is a type of writing that was popular in the late 19th century, particularly among authors in the South of the United States. This style relied heavily on using words, phrases, and slang that were native to the particular region in which the story took place. The term has come to mean any device which implies a specific focus, whether it is geographical or temporal.A well-known local colorism author was Mark Twain with his books Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.8. ImagismImagism was a literary movement which came into being in Britain and U.S. 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: i) direct treatment of subject matter; ii) economy of expression; iii) as regard rhythm, to compose in the sequence of the musicalphrase, not in the sequence of metronome. Ezra Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro” is a well-known imagist poem.9. Harlem RenaissanceHarlem Renaissance is a notable phase of black American writing centered in Harlem (a predominantly black area of New York City) in the 1920s. It brought a new self-awareness and critical respect to black literature in the US. Langston Hughes and Richard Wright are representatives of the movement with their works Weary Blues and Native Son respectively.10. The Lost GenerationThe term Lost Generation was coined by Gertrude Stein to refer to a group of American literary notables who lived in Paris from the time period which saw the end of World War I to the beginning of the Great Depression. Significant members included Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound, Sherwood Anderson, T. S. Eliot, and Gertrude Stein herself. Hemingway likely popularized the term, quoting Stein ( “You are all a lost generation” ) as epigraph to his novel, The Sun Also Rises. More generally, the term is being used for the young adults of Europe and America during World War I. They were “lost” because after the war many of them were disillusioned with the world in general and unwilling to move into a settled life.11. The Jazz AgeThe Jazz Age describes the period of the 1920s and 1930s, the years between World War I and World War II, particularly in North America; with the rise of the Great Depression, the values of this age saw much decline. Perhaps the most representative literary work of the age is American writer F. Sco tt Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, highlighting what some describes as the decadence and hedonism, as well as the growth of individualism.Fi tzgerald is largely credited with coining the term “The Jazz Age”.12. Hemingway (Code) HeroesThe works of Ernest Hemingway generally center on the concept of heroism. Each of his novels contains a “Hemingway hero”— a man of honor and integrity who expresses himself not with words, but with actions. The Hemingway hero is a noble but tragic hero fighting with the overwhelming force; though he knows that he will be defeated at last, he decides to act like a hero. He is not a Godlike figure, but an ordinary, often flawed mortal who must look to himself for strength. The Hemingway hero is actually a mirror image of the author himself. Santiago in The Old Man and the Sea is a typical Hemingway hero.13. The Beat GenerationIn the 1950s, there was a widespread discontent among the postwar generation, whose voice was one of protest against all the mainstream culture that America had come to represent. This has come to be known as the Beat Generation. The word “beat” represented a non-conformist, rebellious attitude toward conventional values concerning sex, religion, the arts, and the American way of life. It was an attitude that resulted from the feeling of depression and exhaustion and the need to escape into an unconvention al, sometimes communal, mode of living. Central elements of “Beat” culture included experimentation with drugs, alternative forms of sexuality, an interest in Eastern religion, a rejection of materialism, and the idealizing of exuberant, unexpurgated means of expression and being.Allen Ginsberg’s Howl (1956), William S. Burroughs’s Naked Lunch (1959) and Jack Kerouac’s On the Road (1957) are among the best known examples of Beat literature.14. Black HumorBlack humor, in literature, drama, and film, grotesque or morbid humor, used to express the absurdity, insensitivity, paradox, and cruelty of the modern world. Ordinary characters or situations are usually exaggerated far beyond the limits of normal satire or irony. Black humor uses devices often associated with tragedy and is sometimes equated with tragic farce. Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 is one of the kind.15. The Southern RenaissanceThe Southern Renaissance is the revival of American Southern literature that began in the 1920s and 1930s until the 1950s. Much of the writings in this unit featured the struggle between those who embraced social changes and those who were more skeptical or challenged social change outright. The writers and intellectuals of the South after the late 1920s were engaged in an attempt to come to terms not only with the inherited values of the Southern tradition, but also with a certain way of perceiving and dealing with the past. In the works of William Faulkner, Katherine Ann Porter, Allen Tate, and Tennessee Williams, among others, the diverse wealth of voices in the early 20th-century South came alive.。

1.American Puritanismit comes from the American puritans, who were the first immigrants moved to American continent in the 17th century. Original sin, predestination（预言）and salvation（拯救）were the basic ideas of American Puritanism. And, hard-working, piousness（虔诚,尽职），thrift and sobriety（清醒）were praised.2.Romanticism: the literature term was first applied to the writers of the 18th century in Europe who broke away from the formal rules of classicalwriting. When it was used in American literature it referred to the writers of the middle of the 19th century who stimulated（刺激）the sentimental emotions of their readers. They wrote of the mysterious of life, love, birth and death. The Romantic writers expressed themselves freely and without restraint. They wrote all kinds of materials, poetry, essays, plays, fictions, history, works of travel, and biography.3.Transcendentalism (先验说,超越论): is a philosophic and literary movement that flourished in New England, particular at Concord, as areaction against Rationalism and Calvinism (理性主义and喀尔文主义). Mainly it stressed intuitive understanding of God, without the help of the church, and advocated independence of the mind. The representative writers are Emerson and Thoreau.4.Local colorism: as a trend became dominant in American literature in the 1860s and early 1870s，it is defined by Hamlin Garland as havingsuch quality of texture and background that it could not have been written in any other place or by anyone else than a native stories of local colorism have a quality of circumstantial(详细的) authenticity(确实性), as local colorists tried to immortalize(使不朽) the distinctive natural, social and linguistic features. It is characteristic of vernacular(本国语) language and satirical(讽刺的) humor5.American Realism: In American literature, the Civil War brought the Romantic Period to an end. The Age of Realism came into existence. Itcame as a reaction against the lie of romanticism and sentimentalism. Realism turned from an emphasis on the strange toward 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 experience6.Naturalism: American naturalism was a new and harsher realism. American naturalism had been shaped by the war; by the social upheavals（剧变）that undermined the comforting faith of an earlier age. America‟s literary naturalists dismissed the validity of comforting m oral 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. Although naturalist literature described the world with sometimes brutal realism, it sometimes also aimed at bettering the world through social reform.7.Imagism（意象派）: It‟s a poetic movement of England and the U.S. flourished from 1909 to 1917.The movement insists on the creation ofimages in poetry by “the direct treatment of the thing” and the economy of wording. The leaders of this movement were Ezra Po und and Amy Lowell.8.The Lost generation：it refers to a group of young intellectuals （知识分子）who came back from war，were injured （受伤害）bothphysically （身体上）and mentally （精神上）. They lived by indulging （放任）themselves in the Bohemian （波西米亚）way of life.Their American dream was disillusioned （破灭了）. The best representative of the lost generation was Ernest Hemingway.9.American Dream: American dream means the belief that everyone can succeed as long as he/she works hard enough. It usually implies asuccessful and satisfying life. It usually framed in terms of American capitalism（资本主义）, its associated purported meritocracy,（知识界精华）and the freedoms guaranteed by the U.S. Bill of Rights.1.What are the artistic characteristics of the Scarlet Letter?The novel, a story of rebellion within an emotionally constricted Puritan society, is an undisputed masterpiece written by Hawthorne. It reveals both Hawthorne‟s super craftsmanship and the powerful psychological insight with which he probed guilt and anxiety in the human soul. Hawthorne‟s remarkable sense of the Puritan past, his understanding of the colonial history in England, his apparent preoccupation with the moral issue of sin and guilt, and his keen psychological analysis of people are brought to full display in the novel. With modern psychological insight, Hawthorne probed the secret motivations in human behavior and the guilt and anxiety that he believed resulted from all sins against humanity, especially those of pride. Hawthorne is a master of symbolism. The structure and the form of the novel are carefully worked out to cater for the thematic concern. By using Pearl as a thematic symbol, Hawthorne emphasizes the consequence of the sin of adultery has brought to the community and people living in that community. The letter A takes on different layers of symbolic meanings.2.What is the relationship between American romanticism and European Romanticism?They share much in common: in reaction to the enlightenment and its emphasis on reason, Romanticism stressed emotion, the imagination, and subjectivity of approach. European literary masters, especially the English counterparts exerted a stimulating impact on the writers of the new World. American romanticism is to some extent derivative after their English predecessors. But the great American Romantic works were typically American. The writers developed some new forms of fiction or poetry. They placed an increasing emphasis on the free expression of emotions and displayed an increasing attention to the psychic states of their characters. The strong tendency to exalt the individual and common man was another focus of the movement.1.The term “Puritan” was applied to those settlers who originally were devout members of the Church of England.2.Harvard College was established in 1636, with a printing press set up nearly in 1639.3.Hard work, thrift, piety and sobriety, these were the puritan values that dominated much of the early American writing.4.The American poets who emerged in the seventeenth century adapted the style of established European poets to the subject matter confronted ina strange, new environment. Anne Bradstreet was one of such poets.5.Bradstreet used a word “pilgrim” to describe the community of believers who sailed from Southampton England, on the Mayflower and settledin Plymouth, Massachusetts, in 1620.6.The writer who best expressed the Puritan faith in the colonial period was John Winthrop.7.The Puritan philosophy known as Puritanism was important in New England during colonial time, and had a profound influence on the earlyAmerican mind for several generations.8.At the initial period the spread of ideas of the American Enlightenment was largely due to journalism.9.Franklin edited the first colonial magazine, which he called the Great Magazine.10.Franklin‟s beat writing is found in his masterpiece Autobiography.11.Thomas Paine, with his natural gift for pamphleteering and rebellion, was appropriately born into an age of revolution.12.On January 10, 1776, Paine‟s famous pamphlet Common Sense appeared.13.Paine‟s second most important work The Rights of Man was an impassioned plea against hereditary monarchy.14.The most outstanding poet in America of the 18th century was Philip Freneau.15.Philip Freneau‟s famous poem “The British Prison Ship” was written about his imprisoned experience.16.Philip Freneau was a close friend and political associate of President Thomas Jefferson.17.Philip Freneau was considered as the “poet of the American Revolution”, because he wrote impassioned verse in support of the Americanrevolution.18.Philip Freneau was noteworthy first because of the nature of his poems. They were truly American and very patriotic. In this respect, he reflectedthe spirit of his age. Therefore, he has been called the “father of American poetry”.19.In American literature, the eighteenth century was an Age of Reason and Revolution.20.In the early 19th century Rip Van Winkle established Washington Irving‟s reputation at home and abroad, and designed the beginning ofAmerican Romanticism.21.Ralph Waldo Emerson‟s first book in 1836 Nature brought American Romanticism into a new phase, the phase of New EnglandTranscendentalism.22.In the early 19th century, Washington Irving wrote The Sketch Book which became the first work by an American writer to win financial successon both sides of the Atlantic.23.Allan Poe‟s poems have the musical quality and romantic beauty. The Raven is his best-known poem.24.The Civil War of 1861-1865 ended in the defeat of the Southerners and the abolition of slavery.25.Leaves of Grass, either in content or form, is an epoch-making work in American literature; its democratic content marked the shift fromRomanticism to Realism, and its free verse form broke from old poetic conventions to open a new road for American poetry.26.Washington Irving was regarded as the first great prose stylist of American Romanticism.27.In 1823 James Fenimore Cooper wrote The Pioneers, the first of the five novels that make up The Leatherstocking Tales. The remaining fourbooks: The Last of the Mohicans, The Prairie, The Pathfinder and The Deerslayer, continue the story of Natty Bumppo, one of the most famous characters in American fiction.28.The short story …The Legend of Sleepy Hollow‟ is taken from Washington Irving‟s work named The Sketch Book.29.Washington Irving was the first American to achieve an international literary reputation after the Revolutionary War.30.Melville is famous for writing about the sea and the islands of the Southern Pacific. In his master piece Moby Dick, he tells a story of whalingvoyage which sets a symbolic account of the conflict between man and his fate.31.The first important American novelist was James Fennimore Cooper.32.The central figure in the Leatherstocking Tales is Natty Bumppo, who goes by the various names of Leatherstocking, Deerlayer, Pathfinder andHawkeye.33.“To a Waterfowl” is perhaps the peak of William Cullen Bryant‟s work. It has been called by an eminent English critic “the most perfect briefpoem in the language”.34.Among William Cullen Bryant‟s most important later works are his translations of the Iliad and the Odyssey into English blank verse.35.Edgar Allan Poe‟s poem “The Raven” is perhaps the best example of onomatopoeia in the English language.36.Most of Allan Poe‟s stories can be roughly divided into two kinds: tales of Gothic horror or grotesque like The Black Cat, an incisive enquiryinto the capacity of the human mind to originate its destruction and The Fall of the House of Usher.37. A superb book Walden came out of Thoreau‟s two-year experience at Walden Pond.38.From Thoreau‟s Concord jail experience, came his famous essay “Civil Disobedience”.39.In 1850, Nathaniel Hawthorne brought out his masterpiece The Scarlet Letter, the story of a triangle love affair in colonial America.40.Herman Melville‟s novel Moby Dick is a tremendous chronicle of a whaling voyage in pursuit of a seemingly supernatural white whale.41.In “I Hear America Singing”, Walt Whitman depicts the beauty of labor and laborers.42.For the whole 19th century Emily Dickinson was the only woman poet who enjoys high academic esteem today. She has been acclaimed as apoet of philosophical and tragic dimensions, a poet who was responsive to the challenging questions of man, nature and human consciousness.43.The American Romantic period stretches from the end of the 18th century through the outburst of the Civil War.44.In The Pioneers, Natty Bumppo represents the ideal American, living a virtuous and free life in God‟s world.45.The way in which Hawthorne wrote The Scarlet Letter suggests that American Romanticism adapted itself to American Puritan morality.。

美国文学名词解释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 1917.The movement insists on the creation of images in poetry by “the direct treatment of the thing” and the economy ofwording.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.。

realism名词解释美国文学美国文学中的写实主义(Realism)是一种流派，它将不发现的社会现实世界作为文学创作的基础。

写实主义尊重和关注社会、种族和经济的议题，充满真实性、详实性及深度;它进一步提出了关于现实世界的真理性和有趣性的想法，如精神状态的描述，有时甚至象征性的内容。

美国文学的写实主义源远流长，从19世纪初的传统小说家和诗人开始，如马克·吐温、大卫·艾略特·洛夫和伯特·罗斯·摩尔等人，其创作风格和观念随着20世纪早期的“现代叙事主义”进一步发展，对美国文学作品的影响甚至跨越了20世纪末的作家。

最早的典型作品包括赫胥黎的《机器时代》(Machine Age)和《安格斯和莎拉的日记》(Diary of Angus and Sarah)。

虽然这些作品很受欢迎，但是它们更多地关注内在的个人情感，而不是外在的社会问题。

美国文学中最具代表性的写实主义作家恐怕是玛格丽特·梭罗(Margaret Sullavan)，她的重要作品包括《实用技能》(Practical Skills)和《为了美国》(For the US)。

她充满深入描述真实世界的文字;，尤其在她早期的作品中，描述普通人的生活，反映了社会的不公平和不足，如饥饿、贫困、就业困难以及少数族裔的压迫等，并宣扬着决心、勤奋、尊重和公平的主题。

此外，她的作品也具有社会导向性，将人物的行动视为反映和改变社会的行动。

即使看似乱七八糟的现实世界也能激发出新的想法，甚至进一步激发出更多普遍性的追求，最终推动社会进步。

写实主义这一流派在美国文学中扮演着重要的角色，因为它旨在提醒我们要关注真实的人生经历，抓住生活中的细节，以便我们睁眼看到人性的美酒和痛苦，从而拓宽我们的眼界。

它还要求文学作品表达出丰富的社会批判意味，从而思考如何解决社会问题，向社会做出贡献。