美国文学史及选读名词解释

美国文学史及选读名词解释1.Transcendentalism19th-century movement of writers and philosophers in New England who were loosely bound toge ther by adherence to an idealistic system of thought based on a belief in the essential unity of all cr eation,the innate goodness of man,and the supremacy of insight over logic and experience for the revelation of the deepest truths.In their religious quest,the Transcendentalists rejected the conven tions of18th-century thought;and what began in a dissatisfaction with Unitarianism developed int o a repudiation of the whole established order.ngston HughesAmerican poet and writer emphasized on lower-class black life.He established himself as a major force of the Harlem Renaissance.In1926,in the Nation,he provided the movement with a manife sto when he skillfully argued the need for both race pride and artistic independence in his most me morable essay,'The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain."In many ways Hughes always remain ed loyal to the principles he had laid down for the younger black writers in1926.His art was firml y rooted in race pride and race feeling even as he cherished his freedom as an artist.He was both n ationalist and cosmopolitan.As a radical democrat,he believed that art should be accessible to as many people as possible.He could sometimes be bitter,but his art is generally suffused by a keen sense of the ideal and by a profound love of humanity,especially black Americans.3.Henry David ThoreauAmerican essayist,poet,and practical philosopher,renowned for having lived the doctrines of Tra nscendentalism as recorded in his masterwork,Walden(1854),and for having been a vigorous adv ocate of civil liberties,as evidenced in the essay“Civil Disobedience”(1849).In his writings Thor eau was concerned primarily with the possibilities for human culture provided by the American na tural environment.He adapted ideas garnered from the then-current Romantic literatures in order t o extend American libertarianism and individualism beyond the political and religious spheres to t hose of social and personal life.He demanded for all men the freedom to follow unique lifestyles, to make poems of their lives and living itself an art.In a restless,expanding society dedicated to pr actical action,he demonstrated the uses and values of leisure,contemplation,and a harmonious ap preciation of and coexistence with nature.Thoreau established the tradition of nature writing later developed by the Americans4.the Harlem RenaissanceThe Harlem Renaissance,a flowering of literature(and to a lesser extent other arts)in New York City during the1920s and1930s,has long been considered by many to be the high point in Africa n American writing.It probably had its foundation in the works of W.E.B.Du Bois who believed that an educated Black elite should lead Blacks to liberation.He further believed that his people co uld not achieve social equality by emulating white ideals;that equality could be achieved only by teaching Black racial pride with an emphasis on an African cultural heritage.Although the Renaiss ance was not a school,nor did the writers associated with it share a common purpose,nevertheless they had a common bond:they dealt with Black life from a Black perspective.Among the major writers who are usually viewed as part of the Harlem Renaissance are Claude McKay,Countee Cu llen,Langston Hughes,Zora Neale Hurston,Rudolph Fisher,James Weldon Johnson,and Jean To omer.5.Mark Twainpseudonym of Samuel Langhorne Clemens American humorist,writer,and lecturer who won a wo rldwide audience for his stories of youthful adventures,especially The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876),Life on the Mississippi(1883),and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn(1884).Writing in American colloquialism and subjects with humors and satires,Mark Twain shed great influence upon later writers such as Sherwood Anderson,Earnest Hemingway and Faulkner.6.Walt WhitmanAmerican poet,journalist,and essayist whose verse collection Leaves of Grass is a landmark in th e history of American literature.Whitman's greatest theme is a symbolic identification of the rege nerative power of nature with the deathless divinity of the soul.His poems are filled with a religio us faith in the processes of life,particularly those of fertility,sex,and the“unflagging pregnancy”of nature:sprouting grass,mating birds,phallic vegetation,the maternal ocean,and planets in for mation.The poetic“I”of Leaves of Grass transcends time and space,binding the past with the pre sent and intuiting the future,illustrating Whitman's belief that poetry is a form of knowledge,the s upreme wisdom of mankind.7.the Lost GenerationIn general,the post-World War I generation,but specifically a group of U.S.writers who came of age during the war and established their literary reputations in the1920s.The term stems from a re mark made by Gertrude Stein to Ernest Hemingway,“You are all a lost generation.”Hemingway u sed it as an epigraph to The Sun Also Rises(1926).The generation was“lost”in the sense that its inherited values were no longer relevant in the postwar world and because of its spiritual alienatio n from a U.S.that,basking under President Harding's“back to normalcy”policy,seemed to its me mbers to be hopelessly provincial,materialistic,and emotionally barren.The term embraces Hemi ngway,F.Scott Fitzgerald,John Dos Passos,e.e.cummings and many other writers who made Par is the centre of their literary activities in the'20s.They were never a literary school.In the1930s, as these writers turned in different directions,their works lost the distinctive stamp of the postwar period.The last representative works of the era were Fitzgerald's Tender Is the Night(1934).8.Ralph Waldo Emerson:American lecturer,poet,and essayist,the leading exponent of New England Transcendentalism.N ature,“The American Scholar,”and Address—had rallied together a group that came to be called the Transcendentalists,of which he was popularly acknowledged the spokesman.Emerson helped i nitiate Transcendentalism by publishing his Nature.Emerson felt that there was no place for free will in the chains of mechanical cause and effect that rationalist philosophers conceived the world as being made up of.This world could be known only through the senses rather than through thou ght and intuition;it determined men physically and psychologically;and yet it made them victims of circumstance,beings whose superfluous mental powers were incapable of truly ascertaining rea lity.Emerson asserts the human ability to transcend the materialistic world of sense experience an d facts and become conscious of the all-pervading spirit of the universe and the potentialities of hu man freedom.Emerson's doctrine of self-sufficiency and self-reliance naturally springs from his vi ew that the individual need only look into his own heart for the spiritual guidance that has hitherto been the province of the established churches.The individual must then have the courage to be hi mself and to trust the inner force within him as he lives his life according to his intuitively derived precepts.9.Edgar Allen PoePoe's work owes much to the concern of Romanticism with the occult and the satanic.It owes muc h also to his own feverish dreams,to which he applied a rare faculty of shaping plausible fabrics o ut of impalpable materials.With an air of objectivity and spontaneity,his productions are closely d ependent on his own powers of imagination and an elaborate technique.His keen and sound judg ment as appraiser of contemporary literature,his idealism and musical gift as a poet,his dramatic art as a storyteller,considerably appreciated in his lifetime,secured him a prominent place among universally known men of letters.The outstanding fact in Poe's character is a strange duality.Muc h of Poe's best work is concerned with terror and sadness.His yearning for the ideal was both of th e heart and of the imagination.His sensitiveness to the beauty and sweetness of women inspired hi s most touching lyrics He is regarded as the father of detective stories.10.Black Humoralso called Black Comedy,writing that juxtaposes morbid or ghastly elements with comical ones. The term did not come into common use until the1960s.Then it was applied to the works of the n ovelists Nathanael West,Vladimir Nabokov,and Joseph Heller.The latter's Catch-22(1961)is a n otable example,in which Captain Yossarian battles the horrors of air warfare over the Mediterrane an during World War II with hilarious irrationalities matching the stupidities of the military system .The term black comedy has been applied to playwrights in the Theatre of the Absurd.11.Benjamin FranklinAmerican printer and publisher,author,inventor and scientist,and diplomat.Franklin,next to Geo rge Washington possibly the most famous18th-century American.He established the Poor Richar d of his almanacs as an oracle on how to get ahead in the world,and become widely known in Eur opean scientific circles for his reports of electrical experiments and theories and wrote his Autobio graphy which is a great contribution to the American literature.12.Ernest HemingwayAmerican novelist and short-story writer,awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in1954.He was noted both for the intense masculinity of his writing and for his adventurous and widely publicized life.His succinct and lucid prose style exerted a powerful influence on American and British ficti on in the20th century.The main characters of The Sun Also Rises,A Farewell to Arms,and For Whom the Bell Tolls are young men whose strength and self-confidence nevertheless coexist with a sensitivity that leaves them deeply scarred by their wartime experiences.War was for Hemingwa y a potent symbol of the world,which he viewed as complex,filled with moral ambiguities,and of fering almost unavoidable pain,hurt,and destruction.To survive in such a world,and perhaps eme rge victorious,one must conduct oneself with honour,courage,endurance,and dignity,a set of pri nciples known as“the Hemingway code.”13.Sherwood Andersonauthor who strongly influenced American writing between World Wars I and II,particularly the te chnique of the short story.His writing had an impact on such notable writers as Ernest Hemingwa y and William Faulkner,both of whom owe the first publication of their books to his efforts.His p rose style,based on everyday speech was markedly influential on the early Hemingway.His best work is generally thought to be in his short stories,collected in Winesburg,Ohio,The Triumph of the Egg(1921),Horses and Men(1923),and Death in the Woods(1933).美国文学名词解释2.American Puritanismit comes from the American puritans,who were the first immigrants moved to American continent in the17th 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.3.Romanticism:the literature term was first applied to the writers of the18thcentury inEurope 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 the19thcentury who stimulated（刺激）the sentimental emotions of their readers.They wrote of the mysterious of life,love,birth an d death.The Romantic writers expressed themselves freely and without restraint.They wrote all ki nds 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 thatflourished 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 advocat ed independence of the mind.The representative writers are Emerson and Thoreau.5.Local colorism:as a trend became dominant in American literature in the1860s andearly1870sit 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)humor6.Stream of consciousness（意识流）：It is one of the modern literary techniques.It isthe style of writing that attempts to imitate the natural flow of a character’s thoughts,feelings,refl ections,memories,and mental images as the character experiences them.It was first used in1922 by the Irish novelist James Joyce.Those novels broke through the bounds of time and space,and d epicted vividly and skillfully the unconscious activity of the mind fast changing and flowing inces santly。