名词解释

Transcendentalism: Following the rise of romanticism, Transcendentalism, which appeared after 1830, marked the maturity of American romanticism and the first renaissance in the American literary history. It expressed a new outlook or new ideas on life.It believed individualism, human beings’ divinity, nature, spiritual life, dignity of manual labor, self-trust/ self-reliance, democracy.(1) They laid emphasis on spirit or Oversoul.(2) It placed emphasis on the importance of theindividual—the most important element in the society (3) Transcendentalism laid stress on Nature as symbolic of the Spirit of God. (4) It also stressed on community living and the dignity of manual labor as an opposition to mechanization.. The most important representatives are Emerson and ThoreauRealism: After the Civil War, people grew scornful of the sentimental feelings of Romanticism.They wanted to mirror the unmitigated realities of life. they sought to describe the wide range of American experience and to present the subtleties of human personality, to portray characters who were less simply all good or all bad.Realism first appeared in the U.S in the literature of local color, which combined romantic plots and realistic descriptions of things. The greatest of America’s realists are Henry James and Mark Twain. In realistic novels, writers pursued accuracy and completeness of description. Yet the accuracy does not mean that the writer must record in detail everything.naturalism.At the end of 19th century, came a generation of writers whose ideas of the workings of the universe and whose perception of social disorder led them to naturalism. The milestones in the development of American naturalism were the publication of Emile Zola’s novels in the 70s and 80s of the 19th C, the success of Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage in the 90s, and the continual appearance of Dreiser’s Sister Carrie(1900), Financier(1912), and An American Tragedy(1925). In poetry, it was represented by Edgar Lee Masters’ Spoon River Anthology (1915), etc.The main characteristics of naturalistic literature. First, naturalistic writers turned literary creation into a mechanical record of society, and never made comments on the characters and their behaviors. Second, the viewpoint from which naturalistic writers understood problems was “non-moral”, and was not controlled by the contemporary moral and ethical sense. They thought there was no difference between “right and wrong”, between “pure and obscene”. Third, their creative material was in finite. He may take no secret of describing sexual love and man’s selfish desire. He may use the any nasty language.Imagist movement: is a movement of English and American poets in revolt from romanticism, seeking clarity of expression through the use of precise images. The principles of the imagist manifesto were laid down by Pound in 1913.Principles of Imagism 1. direct treatment of the “thing” whether subjective or objective. 2. To use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation. 3. as regarding rhythm: to compose in sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of the metronome.16. Modernism is used to show the literary art possessing outstanding characteristics in conception, feeling, form and style after the first World War. It mainly makes a feature of “breaking with the traditional Western cultural foundation conscientiously, cautiously and thoroughly. ” that is to say, the modern writers discarded the traditional literary form, subject and technique of expression, but used totally different imagination to open a new way to take completely new literary creation. To be more exact, modernism means “cutting off history,” a “sense of alienation,” a “sense of loss” and a “sense of despair.” it paid more attention to the individual person and his innate world; compared with self-consciousness, it paid more attention to “sub-consciousness” compared with the scientific deduction, it would rather sing the praises of the mythological heroes.Black Humor. In contemporary literary criticism, black humor is a term applied to a large group of American novels beginning in the 1950s. Although the writers of black humor did not intentionally form a school of literary movement, there is in their novels a common core of satire that is directed against hypocrisy, materialism, racial prejudice, and above all, the dehumanization of the individual by a modern society. In their opinion, their society is full of institutionalized absurdity. Therefore, all of them hold a cynical attitude toward society and the conventional moral values that support that society. This despondency is reflected in their novels, not by angry protest, but by the use of exaggeration of the abnormal and the seamy side of both people and society to the point of ridiculousness and absurdity. It is humor out of despair and laughter out of tears. Joseph Heller is the most important representative of this kind.local colorism: It is a type of writing that was popular in the late 19th century, particularly among authors in the American South of the particular region in which the story took place. Local color fiction “exploits the speech, dress, mannerisms, habits of thought which are peculiar to a certain region. Local color writing exists primarily for the portrayal of the people and life of a geographical setting” .Local colorism is the detailed representation in prose fiction of the setting, dialect, customs, dress and ways of thinking and feeling which are distinctive of a particular.Local colorists: Mark Twain, Bret Harte, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Willa Cather, John Steinbeck and William Faulkner.。