美国文学史名词解释

American realism: a)As a literary movement realism came in the latter half of the nineteenth century as a reaction against “the lie” of romanticism and sentimentalism. It expressed the concern for the world of experience, of the commonplace, and for the familiar and the low. b)The American realists advocated “verisimilitude of detail derived from observation,” the effort to app roach the norm of experience —a reliance on the representative in plot, setting, and character, and to offer an objective rather than an idealized view of human nature and experience.American Naturalism:Naturalism was an outgrowth of Realism that responded to theories in science, psychology, human behavior and social thought current in the late nineteenth century. It had been shaped by the war, by the social upheavals that undermined the comforting faith of an earlier age, and by the disturbing teachings of Darwinism. 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.American Dream: American Dream is a popular belief that people can achieve success, whether it is wealth, fame or love through hones hard working in a new world of liberty, equality, chances and promises. Yet in the 1920s, the American Dream was bankrupt in the sense that the wealthy people were spiritually disorientated and morally corrupted.The fact that the rich people turned to be more indifferent and careless brought forth the disillusionment of American Dream. The man’s real dream is that of achieving a new status and a new status and a new essence, of rising to a loftier place in the mysterious hierarchy of human worth.Code hero:1)The Hemingway hero is an average man of decidedly masculine tastes, sensitive and intelligent, a man of action, and one of few words. 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 2)Hemingway himself defined the Code Hero as “a man who lives correctly, following the deals of honor, courage and endurance in a world that is sometimes chaotic, often stressful, and always painful.”3)Tough guy Colorism:or Regionalism as first appeared in the late 1860s and early seventies in America. Hamlin Garland defined local colorism 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.”The ultimate aim of the local colorists is, as Garland indicates, to create the illusion of an indigenous little world with qualities that tell it apart from the world outside. Local colorists concerned themselves with presenting and interpreting the local character of their regions. They tended to idealize and glorify, but they never forgot to keep an eye on the truthful color of local life. They formed an important part of the realistic movement.Drama :A drama is a work of literature or a composition which delineates life and human activity by means of presenting various actions of, and dialogues between a group of characters. And it’s designed for theatrical presentation.Frontier Humor:It is the vital and exuberant literature that was generated by the westward expansion of the United States in the late 18th and the 19th centuries. The spontaneity, sense of fun, exaggeration, fierce individuality, and irreverence for traditional Eastern values in frontier humor reflect the optimistic spirit of pre-Civil War America. Frontier humor appears mainly in tall tales of exaggerated feats of strength, rough practical jokes, and tales of encounters with panthers snakes. These tales are filled with rough, homely wisdom.Imagism:It is a Movement in U.S. and English poetry characterized by the use of concrete language and figures of speech, modern subject matter, metrical freedom, and avoidance of romantic or mystical themes, aiming at clarity of expression through the use of precise visual images. The Imagist manifesto came out in 1912 showed three Imagist poetic principles: direct treatment of the “thing”, exclusion of superfluous words, the rhythm of the musical phrase rather than the sequence of a metronome .Pound defined an image as that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time, and later he extended this definition when he stated that an image was “a vortex or cluster of fused ideas, endowed with e nergy.” There existed great influence of Chinese poetry on the Imagist movement. Imagists found value in Chinese poetry was because Chinese poetry is, by virtue of the ideographic and pictographic nature of the Chinese language, essentially imagistic poetry.Interior monologue: A narrative technique or passage which suggests a character’s stream of consciousness. Iceberg theory of the psyche: Freud believed that the psyche, or “soul”, of an individual was shaped live an iceberg. Te small part that remained above the surface for all to see was the ego, the individual’s self image that he projected to the world. Below the surface, much larger, the pleasure-principle, the id, remained away from public view. Between the ego and the id, at the “waterline”of the iceberg, was a line separating the two parts of the individual. Occasionally, the id would poke through that line, the barrier was a strong one.Jazz Age: The 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. It refers to the “twenties” of this century. These ten years were, for American, a time of carefree prosperity, isolated from the world’s problem, bewildering great social change, and a feverish pursuit of pleasure. Lost Generation:This term has been used again and again to describe the people of the postwar years. It describes the Americans who remained in Paris as a colony of “expatriates”or exiles, the writers like Hemingway who lived in semi-poverty and also the Americans who returned to their native land with an intense awareness of living in an unfamiliar changing world After World War Ⅰ,the young disappointed American writers, such as Hemingway, Pound, Cummings, Fitzgerald, were welcomed by an American woman writer named Gertrude Stein, who had lived in Paris since 1903. She called them “the Lost Generation”, because they had cut themselves off from their past in America in order to create a completely new type of writing. They wandered pointlessly and restlessly, enjoyingthings like fishing, swimming, bullfight and beauties of nature, but they were aware all the while that the world is crazy and meaningless and futile. Their whole life is undercut and defeatedModernism:1)Modernism is a cultural movement that generally includes the progressive art and architecture, design, literature, music, dance, painting and other visual arts which emerged in the beginning of the 20th century , particularly in the years following World War I. It was a movement of artists and designers who rebelled against late 19th century academic and historicist tradition, and embraced the new economic, social and political aspects of the emerging modern world.2) The avant-garde movements that followed-including Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, Cubism, Futurism, Expressionism, Constructivism, De Stijl, andAbstract Expressionism-are generally defined as Modernist. 3)The essence of modernism was a break with the past, and it also fostered a belief in art and literature as an avenue to self-fulfillment. Modernism took shape in a convergence of tendencies in modern culture, accidental circumstances, and concerted efforts on the part of influential writers.4)It included a wide range of artistic expressions such as symbolism, impressionism, post-impressionism, futurism, constructivism, imagism, vorticism, expressionism, dada, and surrealism.Midwestern realism:I t just refers to William Dean Howells’s realism because he came from the American midwest and carefully interweaved the life and emotions of ordinary middle-class there in his works.Also because he was the champion of realism, having helped to publish many realistic local color writings by Bret Harte, Mark Twain, George Washington Cable, and others.Muckraking :It describes a type of literature that attempts to apply scientific principles of objectivity and detachment to its study of human beings. What is central to literary naturalism is the picture of an entrapped man against an indifferent world. Man, against an indifferent outside world, is a victim of forces over which he has no control. His success or failure is entirely independent of his personal will, and he has to succumb to his inherited characteristics from his parents and the environment he is in. Naturalistic texts often describe the futile attempts of human beings to exercise free will in this universe that reveals free will as an illusion.New Criticism: The New Criticism is a type of formalist literary criticism that reached its height during the 1940s and 1950s and that received its name form John Crowe Ransom’s 1941 book The New Criticism. New Critics treat a work of literature as if it were a self-contained, self-referential object. Rather than basing their interpretations of a text on the reader’s response, the author’s stated intentions, or parallels between the text and historical contexts (such as author’s life), New Critics perform a close reading, concentrating on the relationships within the text that give it its own distinctive character or form.Plastic theater: T.W aims to create what he calls s “plastic theater”to incorporate all stage crafts and poetic lyricism to produce an arresting theater: stage symbols, music, light, arias (long monologues),etcPsychological realism :Henry James is considered the founder of Psychological realism. He shifted the ground of realistic art form the outer to the inner world. We observe events and people filter through the consciousness of his characters. By emphasizing the inner awareness and inward movements of his characters in face of outside occurrence rather than merely portraying their environment in any detail, he became the first of the modern psychological analysts in the novel and anticipated in his works the modern stream of consciousness.Point of view: a. Psychological analysis, forefather of stream of consciousness (James changed the method of presentation in a novel, shifting the centre f gravity form action to its intellectual and fantastic aspects: external circumstances lose significance before the inward events that take place in a soul) b. Psychological realism c. Highly-refined languageSouthern Renaissanceb: 1) In the 20th century, southern literature became not only distinguished but very diverse, yet it has often root its works in the south 2)By 1920s’, a literary movement known as the southern Renaissance emerged. There was a domination of southern literature for at least 4 decades in American Literature.Stream of consciousness :1)A kind of writing that presents the thoughts of a person or character as they occur and in this way the author tries to show the private inner lives of the characters. Devices such as characters speaking to themselves, free association, and lists of words are often used. 2)Stream of consciousness writing 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 a character’s fragmentary thoughts and sensory feelings.Theatre of the Absurd :A new school of drama in the 1950s, appeared in France and then came into vogue in Europe as well as in America.The name was coined by Martin Esslin in his book The Theatre of the Absurd. Absurd means out of harmony or inharmonious. To show man is lost and senseless, absurd, useless. The absurdity of human conditions; life has no A pattern of meaning or ultimate significance and that no activity is more or less valuable than another.The Beat Generation :in the 1950s there was a widespread discontentment among the postwar generation, whose voice was one of protest a gainst all the mainstream culture that American had come to represent .this has become to be known as the Beat Generation. Represented a nonconformist, rebellious attitude toward conventional values concerning sex, religion, the arts, and the American way of life.。