美国文学名词解释

1、American Dream: American dream means the belief that everyone can succeed as longIt usually framed in terms of American capitalismpurported meritocracy, （知识界精华） and the freedoms guaranteed by the U.S. Billas he/she works hard enough. It usually implies a successful and satisfying life. 资本主义） , its a

2、ssociatedof Rights.American Puritanism 清教主义 : Puritanism is the practices and beliefs of the puritans. The Puritans were originally members of a division of the protestant church who wanted to purify their religious beliefs and practices. They accepted the doctrines of predestination, original sin a

3、nd total depravity, and limited atonement through a special infusion of grace from God. American literature in the 17th century mostly consisted of Puritan literature. Puritanism had an enduring influence on American literature. It had become, to some extent, so much a state of mind, so mucha part o

4、f national cultural atmosphere, rather than a set of tenets.Transcendentalism 超 验 主 义 : Transcendentalism was a group of new ideas in literature, religion, culture and philosophy that emerged in New England in the early to middle 19 th century. Transcendentalists spoke for cultural rejuvenation and

5、against the materialism of American society. It placed emphasis on spirit, or the Over soul, as the most important thing in the world. It stressed the importance of individual and offered a fresh perception nature ad symbolic of the spirit ofGod. Prominent transcendentalists included Ralph Waldo Eme

6、rson and Henry DavidThorough.American Naturalism 自然主义 : American naturalism was a new and harsher realism.The naturalists attempt to achieve extreme objectivity and frankness, presenting characters of low social and economic classes who were determined by environment and heredity. It emphasized that

7、 the world was amoral, the 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 naturalism pervaded the works of such American writers asStephen Crane and T

8、heodore Dreiser.American Naturalism（ 美国自然主义文学 ）：The American naturalists accepted the morenegative interpretation of Darwin's evolutionary theory and used it to accountfor the behavior of those characters in literary works who were regarded as more to date.3>the three best-known representativ

9、es of lost generation are F.Scottor less complex combinationssocial and economic forces.2）by naturalism is evolved from realism when the author 'sof inherited attributes, their habits conditionedtone in writing becomes lessserious and less sympathetic but more ironic and morepessimistic. It is n

10、o more than a gloomy philosophical approach to reality, or tohuman existence.3>Dreiser is a leading figure of his school.The Gilded Age 镀金时代 :the Gilded Age refers to the era of rapid economic andpopulation growth inthe United States during the post-Civil War andpost-Reconstruction erasof the lat

11、e 19th century. The term "Gilded Age" was coinedby Mark Twain and CharlesDudley Warner in their 1873 book, The Gilded Age: A Taleof Today .The Gilded Age is most famous for the creation of a modern industrialeconomy. The end of the Gilded Age coincided with thePanic of 1893, a deepdepressi

12、on. The depression lasted until 1897 and marked a major politicalrealignment in the election of 1896. After that came the Progressive Era.The Lost Generation : The Lost Generation is a group of expatriate American writersresiding primarily in Paris during the 1920s and 1930s. The group was given its

13、 nameby the American writer Gertrude Stein, who used “a lost generation ” to referto expatriate Americans bitter about their World War I experiences anddisillusioned with American society. Hemingwaylater used thephrase as an epigraphfor his novel The Sun Also Rises. It consisted of manyinfluentialAm

14、erican writers,including Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, WilliamCarlos Williams andArchibald MacLeish.The Lost Generation（迷惘的一代）：The lost generation is a term first used by Steinto describe the post-war I generation of American writers:men and women hauntedby a sense of betrayal and emptiness

15、 brought about by the destructiveness of thewar.2>full of youthful idealism, these individuals sought the meaning of life, drankexcessively, had love affairs and created some of the finest American literatureFitzgerald, Hemingway and John dos Passos.Tragedy : in general, a literary work in which

16、the protagonist meets an unhappy ordisastrous end. Unlike comedy, tragedy depictsthe actions of a centralcharacter who is usually dignified or heroic. Through a series of events, this tragic hero's downfall vary.is brought to a fi nal downfall. The causes of the tragic heroIn traditional dramas,

17、 the cause can be fate, a flaw in character or an error in judgment. In modern dramas, where the tragic hero is often an ordinary individual, the causes range from moral or psychological weakness to the evils of society.Catch-22 第22条军规: Catch-22 is a general critique of bureaucratic operation and re

18、asoning. Resulting from its specific use in the book, the phrase "Catch-22" isThe term was originally from Joseph Hellercommonidiomatic usage meaning "a no-win situation" or "a double bind" of any type. 's anti novel Catch-22.Beat Generation 垮掉的一代 : group of America

19、n writers of the 1950s whose writing expressed profound dissatisfaction with contemporary American society and endorsed an alternative set of values. The term sometimes is used to refer to those who embraced the ideas of these writers. The Beat Generation's best-known figures were writers Allen

20、Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac.The Beat Generation（ 垮掉的一代 ）:The members of The Beat Generation were new bohemian libertines. Whoengaged in a spontaneous, sometimes messy, creativity.2>The Beat writers produced a body of written work controversial both for its advocacy of non-conformity and for its non

21、-conforming style.3> the major beat writings are Allen Ginsberg 's howl.Howl became the manifesto of The Beat Generation.Psychological Realism 心理现实主义 : it is the realistic writing that probes deeply into the complexities of characte rs' thoughts and motivations. It places more than the us

22、ual amount of emphasis on interior characterization and on the motives, and internal action which springs from and develops external action. In PsychologicalRealism, character and characterization are more than usually important. HenryJames is considered a great master of psychological realism.Free

23、Verse 自由诗体 : free verse is poetry that has an irregular rhythm and linelength and that attempts to avoid any predetermined verse structure, instead, ituses the cadences of natural speech. While it alternates stressed and unstressedsyllables as stricter verse form do, free verse dose so in a looser w

24、ay. WaltWhitman's poetry is an example of free verse.Confessional Poetry 自白诗 : it is a type of modern poetry in which poets speak withopenness and frankness about their own lives, such as in poems about illness,sexuality and despondence. Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath and Allen Ginsberg andTheodore

25、 Roethke are the most important American poets.Imagism 意象派 : The 1920s saw a vigorous literary activity in America. In poetrythere appeared a strong reaction against Victorian poetry. Imagists placed primaryreliance on the use of precise, sharp images as a means of poetic expression andstressed prec

26、ision in the choice of words, freedom in the choice of subject matterand form, and the use of colloquial language. Most of the imagist poets wrote infree verse, using such devices as assonance and alliteration rather than formalmetrical schemes to give structure to their poetry.The movement which ha

27、d theseas its aims is known in literary history as Imagism. Its prime mover was Ezra Pound.Imagism（ 意象主义 ） ： Imagism came into being in Britain and U.S around 1910 as areaction to the traditional English poetry to express the sense of fragmentationand dislocation.2>the imagists, with Ezra Pound l

28、eading the way, hold thatthe mosteffective means to express these momentary impressions is through the use of onedominant image.3>imagism is characterized by the following threepoeticprinciples:A.direct treatment of subject matter;B.economy of expression;C. asregards rhythm ,to composein the sequ

29、ence of the musical phrase, not in the of metronome. 4> pound 's In a Station of the Metro is a wellsequence-known inagist poem.Black Humor: the use of morbid and the absurd for darkly comic purposes in modernfiction and drama. The term refers as much to the tone of anger and bitterness asit

30、does to the grotesque and morbid situations, which often deal with suffering,anxiety, and death. Black humor isa substantial element in the Anti-novel and theTheatre of Absurd. Joseph Heller'sCatch-22 is an almost archetypal example.Irony : a contrast or an incongruitybetween what is stated and

31、what is really meant,or between what is expected to happen and what actually happens in drama andliterature. There are types of irony: verbal irony, dramatic irony and irony ofsituation. Irony of situation typically takes the form of a discrepancy betweenappearance and reality, or between what a cha

32、racter expects and what actuallyhappens. Both verbal and irony of situation share the suggestion of a concealedtruth conflicting with surface appearances.Allusion:A reference to a person, a place, an event, or a literary work that awriter expects the reader to recognize and respond to. An allusion m

33、ay be drawnfrom history, geography, literature, or religion.Satire 讽刺 : A kind of writing that holds up to ridiculeor contempt the weaknessesand wrongdoings of individuals, groups, institutions,or humanity in general. Theaim of satirists is to set a moral standard for society,and they attempt to per

34、suadethe reader to see their point of view through the force of laughter.Symbol: A symbol is a sign which suggests more than its literal meaning. In otherwords, a symbol is both literal and figurative. A symbol is a way of telling a storyand a way of conveying meaning. The best symbols are those tha

35、t are believable inthe lives of the characters and also convincing as they convey a meaning beyondthe literal level of the story. If the symbol is obscure or ambiguous, then thevery obscurity and the ambiguity may also be part of the meaning of the story.Symbolism: Symbolism is the writing technique

36、 of using symbols. It's a literarymovementthat arose in France in the last half of the 19th century and that greatlyinfluenced many English writers, particularly poets, of the 20th century. Itenables poets to compress a very complex idea or set of ideas into one image oreven one word. It 's

37、one of the most powerful devices that poets employ in creation.Stream of consciousness( 意识流 )(or interior monologue);In literary criticism, Streampoint of view by giving the writtenof consciousness denotes a literary technique which seeks to describe an individual 's equivalent of the character

38、's thought processes.Stream of consciousness writing is strongly associated with the modernist movement.Its introduction in the literary context, transferred from psychology, is attributed to MaySinclair. Stream of consciousness writing is usually regarded as a special form of interior monologue

39、 and is characterized by associative leaps in syntax and punctuation that can make the prose difficult to follow,tracing as they do a character 's fragmentary thoughts and sensory feelings.famous writers to employ this technique in the english language include James Joyce and William Faulkner.Am

40、erican realism ：(美国现实主义) Realism was a reaction against Romanticism and pavedgeneration of writers, dissatisfiedthe way to Modernism; 2).During this period a new with the Romantic ideas in the older generation, came up with a new inspiration. This new attitude was characterized by a great interest i

41、n the realities of life. It aimed at the interpretation of the realities of any aspect of life, free from subjectiveprejudice, idealism, or romantic color. Instead of thinking about the mysteries of life and death and heroic individualism,people 's attention was now dir ected to the interesting

42、features of everyday existence, to what was brutal or sordid, and to the open portayal of class struggle;3) so writers began to describe the integrity of human characters reacting under various circumstances and picture the pioneers of the far west, the new immigrants and the struggles of the workin

43、g class; 4) Mark Twain Howells and Henry James are three leading figures of the American Realism.Local Colorism( 乡土文学 ) ： Generally speaking, the writings of local colorists are concerned with the life of a small, well-defined region or province. The characteristic setting is the isolated small town

44、. 2) Local colorists were consciously nostalgic historians of a vanishing way of life, recorders of a present that faded before their eyes. Yet for all their sentimentality, they dedicated themselves to minutely accurate descriptions of the life of their regions, they worked from personal experience

45、 to record the facts of a local environment and suggested that the native life was shaped by the curious conditions of the local. 3) major local colorists is Mark Twain.A Jazz age（ 爵士时代 ）:The Jazz Age describes the period of the 1920s and 1930s, theyears between world war I and world war II. Particu

46、larly in north America. With therise of the great depression, the values of this age saw muchdecline. Perhaps the mostrepresentative literary work of the age is American writer Fitzgerald's The GreatGatsby. Highlighting what some describe as the decadence and hedonism, as well as the” Jazzgrowth

47、 of individualism.Age”.Fitzgerald is largely credited with coining the termFeminism（女权主义）:Feminisim incorporates both a doctrine of equal rights for womenand an ideology of social transformation aiming to create a world for womenbeyond simple social equality.2>i n general, feminism is ideology of

48、 women's liberation based on thebelief that women suffer injustice because of their sex. Under this broad umbrellavarious feminisms offer differing analyses of the causes, or agents, of femaleoppression.3> definitions of feminism by feminists tend to be shaped by their training,ideology or ra

49、ce. So, for example, Marxist and socialist feminists stress theinteraction within feminism of class with gender and focus on social distinctionsbetween menand women.Black feminists argue muchmore for an integrated analysis whichcan unlock the multiple systems of oppression.HemingwayCode Hero（ 海明威式英雄

50、 ）: HemingwayCode Hero ,also called code hero, is onewho, wounded but strong more sentitive, enjoys the pleasures of life（ sex, alcohol,sport） in face of ruin and death, and maintains, through somenotion of a code, an idealof himself.2> barnes in the sun also Rises, henry in a Farewell to arms an

51、d santiagoin the old man and the sea are typical of Hemingway Code HeroImpressionism（ 印象主义 ）:Impressionism is a style of painting that gives the impressionmade by the subject on the artist without much attention to details. Writers acceptedthe sameconviction that the personal attitudes and moodsof t

52、he writer were legitimateelements in depicting character or setting or action.2>briefly, it is a style ofliterature characterized by the creation of general impressions and moods rather thatrealistic mood.Modernism（现代主义）:Modernism is comprehensive but vague term for a movement , whichbegin in the

53、 late 19th century and which has had a wide influence internationallyduringmuch of the 20th century.2> modernism takes the irrational philosophy and the theoryof psycho-analysis as its theoretical case.3> the term pertains to all the creativearts. Especially poetry, fiction, drama, painting,mu

54、sic and architecture.4>inenglandfrom early in the 20th century and during the 1920s and 1930s, in America fromshortlybefore the first world war and on during the inter-war period, modernist tendencieswere at their most active and fruitful.5>as far asliterature is concerned, Modernismreveals a

55、breaking away fromestablished rules, traditions and conventions.fresh waysof looking at man's positionand function in the universe and manyexperimentsi n formand style.it is particularlyconcerned with language and how to use it and withwritingitself.the gilded age : Plains Indians were pushed in

56、 a series of Indian wars onto restrictedbecamereservations.This period also witnessed the creation of a modern industrial economy.A national transportation and communication network wascreated, the corporation the dominant form of business organization, and a managerial revolution transformedbusines

57、s operations. By the beginningof the twentieth century, per capita income and industrial production in the United States exceeded that of any other country exceptBritain. Long hours and hazardous working conditions, led many workers to attempt to form labor unions despite strong opposition from industrialists and the courts.An era of intense political partisanship, the Gilded Age was also an era of reform. The CivilService Act sought to curb government corruption by requiring applicants for certain governmental jobs to take a competitive examination. The Interstate Commerce Act soug