美国文学名词解释

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 awayfrom 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. 2. Transcendentalism (先验说,超越论): is a philosophic and literary movement that flourished in NewEngland, 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.Local colorism: as a trend became dominant in American literature in the 1860s and early 1870s，it is definedby 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) humor5.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。

6.American Realism: In American literature, the Civil War brought the Romantic Period to an end. The Age ofRealism 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 experience7.Naturalism: American naturalism was a new and harsher realism. American naturalism had been shaped bythe 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.Imagism（意象派）: It’s a poetic movement of Engl and and the U.S. flourished from 1909 to 1917.Themovement 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 Pound and Amy Lowell.9.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），ect10.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）both physically （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.11.American Dream: American dream means the belief that everyone can succeed as long as he/she works hardenough. 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.The Harlem Renaissance：refers to the flowering of African American literature, art, and drama during the1920s and 1930s. Though centered in Harlem, New York, the movement impacted urban centers throughout the United States. Black novelists, poets, painters, and playwrights began creating works rooted in their own culture instead of imitating the styles of Europeans and white Americans.。