美国文学术语

American Literary Terms美国文学术语1. RomanticismThis literary movement started in the late 18th century in Europe. Romanticists take materials or subjects from mythologies or from history. The depiction of individual emotions is emphasized and life is dramatized. Hawthorne, Melville, and Whitman are regarded as the representatives of American Romanticism.2. American Romanticism(1) It is one of the most important periods in the history of American literature that stretches from the end of the 18th century to the outbreak of the Civil War. It started with the publication of Washington Irving’s The Sketch Book and ended with Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass.(2) Being a period of the great flowering of American literature, it is also called “the American Renaissance”.(3) American romantic works emphasize the imaginative and emotional qualities of literature. The strong teddency to eulogize the individual and the common man was typical of this period. Most importantly, the writings of American Romanticism are typically American. Works concentrate on unique characteristics of the American land.(4) New England Transcendentalism is the summit of American Romanticism.(5) Romanticists include such literary figures as Washington Irving, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, William Cullen Bryant, Henry Wordsworth Longfellow, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allen Poe, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman and some others.3. Transcendentalism(1) Transcendentalism has been defined philosophically as “the recognition in man of the capacity of knowing truth intuitively, or of attaining knowledge transcending the reach of the senses”.(2) Transcendentalism stress the importance of the Over-soul, the Individual and Nature. Other concepts that accompanied Transcendentalism include the idea that nature is ennobling and the idea that the individual is ddivine and, therefore, self-reliant. New England Transcendentalism is the product of a combination of native American Puritanism and European Romanticism.4. Free Verse(1) Free verse means the rhymed or unrhymed poetry composed without paying attention to conventional rules of 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 recreate instead the free rhythms of natural speech.(4) What Whitman’s Leaves of Grass is, perhaps, the most notable example.5. Symbol(1) It means an act, a person, a thing, or a spectacle that stands for something else, usually something less palpable than the named symbol.(2) The relationship etween the symbol and its referent is not often one of simple equivalence. Allegorical symbols usually express a neater equivalence with what they stand for than the symbols found in modern realistic fiction.6. Theme(1) It means the unifying point or meaning of a literary work.(2) It is rarely directly stated, though often it is closely paraphrases by an author’s observation or by a statement made by one of the characters.7. Caroline Meeber(1) Caroline Meeber is the heroine in Dreiser’s Sister Carrie.(2) Caroline Meeber is a pretty, small-town girl who drifts to Chhicago with vague ambition in pursuit of a job and fortune.(3) She is used by men and uses them in turn to become a successful actress. On the other hand, Mr. Hurstwood, a middle-aged, married, comparatively intelligent and cultured saloon manager, elopes with her. However, away from the atmosphere of success on which his life has been based, steadily declines. Abandoned by Carrie, Hurstwood sinks lower and lower. After becoming a beggar, he commits suicide.(4) Caroline Meeber goes unpunished for her wrongdoings against conventional sexual morality.(5) Caroline Meeber is a case in point that shows Dreiser’s naturalistic ideas about human conditions.8. Trilogy of Dreiser(1) It refers to Theodore Dreiser’s three novels: The Fiancier, The Titan and The Stoic.(2) The trilogy is based on the life of Charles T. Yerkes, an American transportation magnate.(3) In his trilogy Dreiser’s focus shifted from the pathos of the helpless protagonists at the bottom of the society to the power of the American financial tycoons in the late 19th century.9. RealismRealism originated in France. In arts, it concerns the depiction of subjects as they appear in everyday life. It is a literary doctrine or trend that calls for "reality and truth" in the description of ordinary life. Realistic authors want to show life as it is and see art's purpose as that of revealing life to people.10. The Age of Realsim(1) 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 with a 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 fom 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 portrayal 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.11. Naturalism(1) Naturalism is a literary movement related to and sometimes described as an extreme form of realism but which may be appropriately considered as a parallel to philosophic naturalism.(2) As a more deliberate kind of realism naturalism usually involves a view of human beings as passive victims of natural forces and social environment. In naturalism a more documentary-like approach is in evidence, with a great stress on how environment and heredity shape people.(3) As a literary movement, naturalism was initiated in France.(4) Naturalism fiction aspired to a sociological objectivity, offering detailed and fuly researched investigations into unexplored concerns of modern society.(5) Naturalism is principally associated with the French novelist Emile Zola, but is carried on in American fiction by writers such as Theodore Dreiser and Stephen Crane. Like realism, it came from Europe. It was a new and harsh realism. American naturalists attempted to achieve extreme objectivity and frankness, presenting characters of low and economic classes who were dominated by their environment and heredity. Darwinism, pessimism and determinism pervade the works of naturalism. In American literature, Famous naturalist writers include Dreiser, Crane, Norris and others.12. Darwinism(1) The term 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 adapt themselves 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 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 human nature and social reality.13. 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 consciouslynostalgic 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 form 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, and Kate Chopin, etc.14. First-person narrative(1) First-person narrative is also called first person point of view, which is used in the analysis and criticism of fiction to describe the way in which the writer presents the reader with the materials of the story.(2) The first person point of view relates events as they are perceived by a single character, “I”.(3) The I—narrator may be part of the action or an observer, a major or minor participant in the action.(4) This technique makes you feel part of the story because the narrator’s “I” echoes the “I” already in your own mind.(5) Mark Twain’s novel Huck Finn is presented from the first person viewpoint and Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre is also a case in point in which the narrator is also the central character.15. American Naturalism(1) The American naturalists accepted the more negative interpretation of Darwin’s evolutionary theory and used it to account for the behavior of those characters in literary works who were regarded as more oe less complex combination 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.16. The Lost Generation(1) It is a term first used by Gertrude Stein to describe the post-World War I generation of American writer: 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, Ernest Hemingway and John Dos Passos.(4) Others usually included amog the list are Sherwood Anderson, Kay Boyle, Hart Crane, Ford Maddox Ford and Zelda Fitzgerald.17. Imagism(1) 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, holding that the most effective means to express these momentary impressions is through the use of one dominant image. The image is a representation of a physical object, and the reader is made to reader to it.(3) Imagist is characterized by the following three poetic principles: a. direct treatment of “the thing”, whether subjective or objective; b. to use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation; c. 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-konown imagist poem18. The Beat Generation(1) The members of the beat generation were new bohemian libertines, who engaged in a spontaneous, sometimes messy, creativity. The beat writers produced a body of written work controversial both for its advocacy of non-conformity and for its non-conforming style.(2) The major beat writers are Jack Kerouac’s On the Road and Allen Ginsberg’s Howl.19. Expressionism(1) The term refers to a movement in Germany very early in the 20th century (1905) in which a number of painters sought to avoid the representation of external reality and, instead, to project themselves and a highly personal vision of the world. In fine arts it involves such techniques as exaggerating or distorting forms and applying intensified colors to express emotion.(2) In literature expressionism involves the presentation of life and world through intensified impressions and moods of characters. Expressionism is a reaction against realism or naturalism, aiming at presenting a post-war world violently distorted. Often emphasized emotions, subjective reactions of characters and symbolic or abstract representationsof reality are apparent in such literature.(3) Works noted for expressionism include: Eugene O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones, James Joyce’s Ulysses and Ginnegans Wake, and T. S. Eiot’s The Waste Land.(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 Romanticism.20. Hemingway Hero(1) Hemingway Hero, also called code hero, is one who, wounded but strong, more sensitive, enjoys the pleasure of life (sex, alcohol, sport) in face of ruin and death, 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 aretyical of Hemingway Hero.21. Harlem Renaissance(1) It refers to a period of outstanding literary vigor and creativity that occurred in the United States during the 920s. In the early 1920s, African American writers, painters, photographers, musicians congregated (gathered) In New York City, started magazines, published anthologies (collections of books 文集), and promoted the creative work of the “New Negro.” They came from farms and plantations, villages, towns and cities across the United States. Their work transformed Harlem, an African American neighborhood in New York, into an intellectual and culture center. This movement is known as “Harlem Renaissance.”(2) The Harlem Renaissance changed the images of literature created by many black and white American writers. New black images are no longer obedient and docile, instead they show 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 leading figures are Langston Hughes, James Weldon Johnson, Wallace Thurman, etc.22. Feminism(1) The deginition incorporates both a doctrine of equal rights for women and an ideology of social transformation aiming to crate 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 carious 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 Socialsit 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 system of oppression.23. Black HumorIn literature, drama, and film, grotesque or morbid humor is 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. Black humor abounds in the works of Kurt V onnegut and Joseph Heller.。