美国文学术语解释.doc

1. American Puritanism: Puritanism is the practices and briefs of the Puritans. As the word itself hints, Puritans wanted to purify their religious beliefs and practices. The American Puritans, like their brothers back in England, were idealists, believing that the church should be restored to complete “purity”. They accepted the doctrine of predestination, original sin and total depravity, and limited atonement through a special infusion of grace from God. But in the grim struggle for survival, they became more and more practical and built a way of life that stressed hard work, thrift, piety, and sobriety. So they were practical idealists. As a culture heritage, Puritanism did have a profound influence on the early American mind and American literature as Confucianism did on Chinese. It encouraged Americans fighting the bad and harsh condition. The American Puritans metaphorical mode was chiefly used in the American literary symbolism. This kind of puritan minds formed part of the intellectual tradition. Some writers, such as, Hawthorne, Melville, Howells, were very skillful at symbolism. Another influence on literature is simplicity. So their writing style is fresh, simple and direct.2. Alliteration: The repetition of similar sounds, usually consonants or consonant clusters, in a group of words. Sometimes the term is limited to the repetition of initial consonant sounds. When alliteration occurs at the beginning of words, it is called initial alliteration; when it occurs within words, it is called internal or hidden alliteration. It usually occurs on stressed syllables.Although alliteration sometimes appears in prose, it is mainly a poetic device. Like other forms of sound repetition, alliteration in poetry serves two important purposes: it is pleasing to the ear, and it emphasizes the words in which it occurs. A well-known example of alliteration is this line from Samuel Taylor Coleridges “Kubla Khan”: “Five miles meandering with a mazy motion.”Alliteration is an important poetic device in Anglo-Saxon poetry where it generally occurs on three of the four stressed syllables in a line. Something of the alliterative effect can be seen in this line from Beowulf: “And the heathens only hope, Hell.” 3. Symbolism: It is the writing technique of using symbols. A symbol is something that conveys two kinds of meaning; it is simply itself, and it stands for something other than itself. In other words, a symbol is both literal and figurative. People, place, things and even events can be used symbolically. A symbol is a way of telling a story and a way of conveying meaning. The best symbols are those that are believable in the lives of the characters and also convincing as they convey a meaning beyond the literal level of the story. Hawthorne and Melville are the two masters of symbolism. 4.School-room Poets: “School-room Poets” or “New England Poets” or “Fireside Poets” refer to Longfellow, Holmes, Lowell and Whittier. They began writing during the time of Emerson, Hawthorne and Melville. Their visions, however, were neither strictly transcendental nor difficult and bleak. They did not form an organized group, but history has linked them for what they had in common. They were often concerned with ordinary American people and value. Their poems were inspiring and easy to read; they made the room of poetry immensely popular. The name suggests their honored place in American Schools and homes during the 1800s. But they were likely conservative and imitative, all spokesmen for the culture of Europe. However, their contribution to the development of American poetry deserves appreciative recognition. 5. American Romanticism: The Romantic Period covers the first half of the 19th century. A rising America with its ideals of democracy and equality, its industrialization, its westward expansion, and a variety of foreign influences such as Sir Walter Scott were among the important factors which made literary expansion and expression not only possible but also inevitable in the period immediately following the nations political independence. Yet, romantic 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 mans societies a source of corruption. Romantic values were prominent in American politics, art, and philosophy until the Civil War. The romantic exaltation of the individual suited the nations revolutionary heritage and its frontiers egalitarianism. Irvings fascinating The Sketch Book will be placed at the top of any reading list for course on American literature. Coopers Leather-stocking Tales was to remain a major concern for many later authors. American Romanticism culminated around the 1840s in what has come to be known as “New England Transcendentalism” or “American Renaissance”. In this period, Emerson and Thoreau were the two major literary figures. Emersons Nature has been called “the manifesto of American Transcendentalism”. Whitman and Dickinson were the two major American poets of 19th century. Hawthorne and Melville belonged to another type of Romanticists. Hawthorne did not feel comfortable with Emersons buoyant sense of optimism about man and his nature. Melville was critical of Emersons optimistic view of life, as is shown in his famous work Moby Dick. Such romantic writers placed increasing value on the free expression of emotion and displayed increasing attention to the psychic states of their characters. Heroes and heroines exhibited extreme of sensitivity and excitement. The novel of terror became the profitable literary staple. A preoccupation with the demonic and the mystery of evil marked the works of Poe, Hawthorne, Melville and a host of minor writers.6. American Realism: In American literature, the civil war brought the romantic period to an end. The age of realism came into existence. It came as a reaction against the lie of romanticism and sentimentalism, as Everett Carter put it. 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 common place and the low, and it offers an objective rather than an idealistic view of human nature and human experience. Realist literature finds the drama and the tension beneath the ordinary surface of life. A realist writer is more objective than subjective, more descriptive than symbolic. Realists looked for truth in everyday truths. A fearless and enthusiastic champion of the new school was William Dean Howells, who by virtue of his powerful critical writings and of his generous patronage as senior editor of the influential journal Atlantic Monthly. Two other staunch fighters for realism were Mark Twain and Henry James. Beginning as a local colorist, Mark Twain wrote works which have become part of the American cultural tradition. Henry James, with his “international theme”, and his psychological realism, is now considered as one of the most important literary figures coming out of the nineteenth century.7. Psychological Realism: It is the realistic writing that probes deeply into the complexities of characters thoughts and motivations. Henry James novel The Ambassadors is considered to be a masterpiece of psychological realism. And Henry James is considered the founder of it. He believed that reality lies in the impressions made by life on the spectator, and not in any facts of which the spectator in unaware. Such realism is therefore merely the obligation that the artist assumes to represent life as he sees it, which may not be the same life as it “really” is.8. American Naturalism: American Naturalism was a new and harsher realism, and like realism, it had come from Europe. 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. Americas literature naturalists dismissed the validity of comforting moral truths. They attempted to achieve extreme objectivity and frankness, presenting characters of low social and economic classed who were determined by their environment and heredity. In presenting the extremes of life, the naturalists sometimes displayed an affinity to the sensationalism of early romanticism, but unlike their romantic predecessors, the naturalists emphasized that the world was amoral, that men and women had no free will, that lives were controlled by heredity and environment, that the destiny of humanity was misery in life and oblivion in death. The pessimism and deterministic ideas of naturalism pervaded the works of such American writers as Stephen Crane, Frank Norris, Jack London and Theodore Dreiser. Cranes Maggie: A Girl of the Streets is the first American naturalistic work. Norris McTeague is the manifesto of American naturalism. Dreisers Sister Carrie is the work in which naturalism attained maturity.Although naturalist literature described the world with sometimes brutal realism, it sometimes also aimed at bettering the world through social reform. This combination of grim reality and desire for improvement is typical of America as it moved into the twentieth century.9. Regionalism: In literature, regionalism or local color fiction refers to fiction or poetry that focuses on specific features including characters, dialects, customs, history, and topography of a particular region. Since the region may be a recreation or reflection of the authors own, there is often nostalgia and sentimentality in the writing.10. The Gilded Age: the Gilded Age refers to the era of rapid economic and population growth in the United States during the post-Civil War and post-Reconstruction eras of the late 19th century. The term Gilded Age was coined by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner in their 1873 book, The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today.The Gilded Age is most famous for the creation of a modern industrial economy. The end of the Gilded Age coincided with the Panic of 1893, a deep depression. The depression lasted until 1897 and marked a major political realignment in the election of 1896. After that came the Progressive Era.11. Local Colorism: Local colorism or Regionalism as a trend first made its presence felt in the late 1860s and early seventies in America. The list of names of the local colorists is a long one. 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.” Garlands “texture” refers to the elements which characterize a local culture, such as speech, customs and other peculiarities. And his “background” covers physical setting and those distinctive qualities of Landscape which condition human thought and behavior. 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.The appearance of Bret Hartes The Luck of Roaring Camp in 1868 marked a significant development in the brief history of local color fiction. 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. Although it lost its momentum toward the end of the nineteenth century, the local spirit continued to inspire and fertilize the imagination of authors such as Willa Cather, John Steinbeck and William Faulkner.12. 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. It describes the writers like Hemingway who lived in semi-poverty. It describes the Americans who returned to their native land with an intense awareness of living in an unfamiliar world. An American woman writer Gertrude Stein called them “the Lost Generation”, because they had cut themselves off from their past in American in order to create new types of writing and cut off from the old values and yet unable to come to terms with the new era when civilization had gone mad. They wandered pointlessly and restlessly.13. Imagism: The 1920s saw a vigorous literary activity in America. In poetry there appeared a strong reaction against Victorian poetry, the chief characteristics of which are its moralizing tendencies, its overpadding of extra-poetic matter, and its traditional iambic pentameter. The emphasis was now on the economy of expression and on the use of a dominant image. The movement which had these as its aims is known in literary history as Imagism. Its prime mover was Ezra Pound, an expatriate American poet who translated some of Li Pos poems and wrote his The Cantos, quoting extensively from Chinese history and Confucius. Although short-lived, the Imagist movement had a tremendous influence on modern poetry. Most of the important twentieth-century American poets were related with it: William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, E.E.Cummings, Carl Sandburg, and T.S.Eliot, to name just the important few.To be more exact in poetic significance, the literary movement “Imagism” was begun by Ezra Pound and a few friends who wanted to rid poetry of the “bad habits” that they felt nineteenth-century poets had fallen into: the use of too many words; the use of words no longer in actual speech; repetitious subject matter; and the use of tired poetic patterns, especially traditional stanzas and meters. Imagist poems are usually written in free verse-verse with no fixed rhythm-and are often quite short. They use one quick image to capture an emotion, to freeze one moment in time. Imagists took some of their inspiration from the highly disciplined Japanese verse form haiku: The first line of a haiku contains five syllables; the second line, seven; and the third line, five.Imagism was a movement that came and went: Few pure Imagist poems were written after 1920. Nevertheless, the ideas of Imagism have had a great impact on modern poetry and on the way we read it.14. Impressionism: Impressionism was a form of artistic expression in the 19th century .It was most pervasive in painting, but it was also found in literature and art .The term “impressionism “first appeared in 1874 in a newspaper review of an exhibition held in the studio by a group of young painters .It was taken directly from the title of Monets Impression: Sunrise.15. Hemmingway Heroes: It refers to some protagonists in Hemmingways works. Such a hero is an average man of decidedly masculine tastes, sensitive and intelligent. And usually he is a man of action and of few words. He is such an individualist, alone when with other people, somewhat an outsider, keeping emotions under control, stoic and self-disciplined in a dreadful place where one can not get happiness.16, Stream-of-Consciousness: “Stream-of-Consciousness” or “interior monologue”, is one of the modern literary techniques. It was first used in 1922 by the Irish novelist James Joyce. This modernistic trend in 1920s, deeply influenced by the psycho-analytic theories of Sigmund Freud, adopted the psycho-analytic approach in literary creation to explore the existence of subconscious and unconscious elements in the mind. In English fiction, the novels of stream-of-consciousness were represented by James Joyce and Virginia Woolf. 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, particularly the hesitant, misted, distracted and illusory psychology people had when they faced reality. Britain was the centre of the novels of stream-of-consciousness. The modern American writer William Faulkner successfully advanced this technique. In his stories, action and plots were less important than the reactions and inner musings of the narrators. Time sequences were often dislocated. The reader feels himself to be a participant in the stories, rather than an observer. A high degree of emotion can be achieved by this technique. But it also makes the stories hard to understand.17. Multiple points of view: The modern American writer William Faulkner used a remarkable range of techniques, themes and tones in his fiction. He successfully advanced two modern literary techniques, one was stream-of-consciousness, the other was multiple points of view. Faulkner was a master at presenting multiple points of view, showing within the same story how the characters reacted differently to the same person or the same situation. The use of this technique gave the story a circular from wherein one event was the center, with various points of view radiating from it. The multiple points of view technique makes the reader recognize the difficulty of arriving at a true judgment.18. The Jazz Age: The Jazz Age describes the period after the end of World War I, through the Roaring Twenties, ending with the onset of the Great Depression. Traditional values of the previous period declined while the American stock market soared.The age takes its name from popular music, which saw a tremendous surge in popularity. Among the prominent concerns and trends of the period are the public embrace of technological developments typically seen as progress cars, air travel and the telephone - as well as new modernist trends in social behavior, the arts, and culture. Central developments included Art Deco design and architecture. The phrase was coined by the writer F. Scott Fitzgerald, who greatly criticized this new era of relaxation in novels such as The Great Gatsby.19. The Era of Modernism: The years from 1910 to 1930 are often call