美国文学史 术语解释

术语解释

American Romanticism

The romantic period stretched from the end of the eighteenth century through the outbrea k of the Civil War. It is a term that is associated with imagination and boundlessness, as contra sted with classicism, which is commonly associated with reason and restriction. A romanti c attitude may be detected in literature of any period, but as an historical movement it arose i n the 18th and 19th centuries, in reaction to more rational literary, philosophic, artistic, religio us, and economic

standards. The most clearly defined romantic literary movement in the U.S.was Transcendenta lism.Romantics frequently shared certain general characteristics: moral enthusiasm, faith in value of individualism and intuitive perception, and a presumption that the natural world was a source of goodness and man’s societies as a source of corruption.

The representatives of the early period includes Washington Irving and James Fenimore Cooper, and those of the late period contain Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Edgar Allan Poe.

American Realism;

As a literary movement,Realism came in the latter half of the 19th century as a reaction against the lie of romanticism and sentimentalism. It 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 common place and the low, and it offers an objective rather an idealistic view of human nature and human experience. The American realists advocated “verisimilitude of detail derived from observation,”the effort to approach 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. Realists looked for truth in everyday truths. Some of the representatives are William Dean Howells and Henry James Enlightenment:

The American Enlightenment is the intellectual thriving period in America in the mid-to-late 18th century(1715-1789),especially as it relates to American Revolution on the one hand the the European Enlightenment on the other. Influenced by the scientific revolution of the 17th century and the humanist period during the Renaissance, the Enlightenment took scientific reasoning and applied it to human nature,society and religion.

Politically, the age is distinguished by an emphasis upon liberty,democracy, republicanism and religious tolerance--culminating in the drafting of the United States Declaration of Independence and Constitution. Attempts to reconcile science and religion resulted in a rejection of prophecy, miracle and revealed religion, often in preference for Deism. Historians have considered how the ideas of John Locke and republicanism merged to form Republicanism in the United States. The most important leaders of the American Enlightenment include Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson.