美国文学-名词解释

1、美国文学.殖民地时期及独立革命战争时期的美国文学Philip Freneau (菲利普弗瑞诺)(1)He was considered as the “ Poet of the American revolution as the most outstanding poetAmerica of the 18th century. (2)He was a satirist, a bitter polemicist. (3)He wrote many poemsencouraging revolution and encouraging the glory that would be won by

2、 overcoming the British.The Wild Honey Suckle野金银花The Indian Burying Ground印第安人的殡葬地The British Ship英国囚船The Rising Glory of America美洲光辉的兴起 (1)The Wild Honey Suckle is Freneau s b桂sanycp位ed the 19th-century use of simple nature imagery.The Indian Burying Ground anticipated romantic primitivism and the

3、celebration of the Savage” .Thomas Jefferson (托马斯杰弗逊)The Declaration of Independence独立宣言(1)The Declaration of Independence was adopted July 4, 1776. (2)It not only announced the birth of a new nation, but also expounded a philosophy of human freedom. (3)It lists 13 cruelties committed by the King of

4、 Britain. (4)The famous lines are:We hold theseetvixthsttcthsit seey areendowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. (5) Thomas Jefferson s thought was inspired by the thoughts of John Lock浪漫主义时期的美国文学Calvinism (加尔文主义)(1)Ca

5、lvinism refers to the religious teachings of John Calvin and his followers. (2) Calvin taught that only certain persons, the elect, were chosen by God to be saved, and these could be saved only by God s grace. (3) Calvinism forms the basis for the doctrinead practices of the Huguenots, Puritans, Pre

6、sbyterians, and the Reformed churches.American Romanticism (美国浪漫主义)American Romanticism is one of the most important periods in the history of American literature.It was a rebellion against the objectivity of rationalism. For romantics, the feelings ,intuitions and emotions were more important than

7、reason and common sense. They emphasized individualism, placing the individual against the group. They affirmed the inner life of the self, and cherished strong interest in the past, the wild, the remote, the mysterious and the strange. They stressed the element“Americanness “ in their wo(3)st start

8、ed with the publication of Washington Irving s TheBook and ended with Walt Whitman s Leaves3Df(G)rBeing a period of the great flowering ofAmerican literature, it is also called“the American Renaissance. s5s Aidedean Romanticsuch literary figures as Washington Irving, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David

9、 Thoreau, WilliamCullen Bryant, Henry Wordsworth Longfellow, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman and some others.Transcendentalism (超验主义)(1) Transcendentalism refers to the religious and philosophical doctrines of Ralph Waldo Emerson and others in New England in the m

10、iddle 1800 s, which emphasized the importance of individualinspiration and intuition, the Oversoul, and Nature. Other concepts that accompanied Transcendentalism include the idea that nature is ennobling and the idea that the individual is divine and, therefore, self-reliant. (2)New England Transcen

11、dentalism is the product of a combination of native American Puritanism and European Romanticism.Free verse (自 由体诗歌)(1)Free verse means the rhymed or unrhymed poetry composed without paying attention to conventional rules of meter.(2) Free verse was originated by a group of French poets of the late

12、19 century. (3)Their purpose was to free themselves from the restrictions of formal metrical patterns and to recreate instead the free rhythms of natural speech. (4)Walt Whitman s Leaves of Grass is, perhap the most notable example.Symbol (象征)(1) Symbol means an act, a person, a thing, or a spectacl

13、e that stands for something else, usually something less palpable than the named symbol. (2) The relationship between the symbol and its referent is not often one of simple equivalence. Allegorical symbols usually express a neater equivalence with what they stand for than the symbols found in modern

14、 realistic fiction.Theme (主题)(1) Theme means the unifying point or general idea of a literary work. (2) It provides an answer to such questions as “What is the work about (3)Each literary work carries its own theme or themes. example, King Lear has many themes, among which are blindness and madness.

15、现实主义与自然主义时期的美国文学American Naturalism (美国自然主义)The American Naturalists accepted the more negative interpretation of Darwin s evolutionary theory and used it to account for the behavior of those characters in literary works who were regarded as more or less complex combinations of inherited attributes,

16、 their habits conditioned by social and economic forces.American Naturalism is evolved from realism when the author s tone in writing becomes less serious and less sympathetic but more ironic and more pessimistic. It is no more than a gloomy philosophical approach to reality, or to human existence.D

17、reiser is a leading figure of his school.Darwinism (达尔文主义)Darwinism is a term that comes from Charles DarwiH s evolutionary theory.Darwinist think that those who survive in the world are the fittest and those who fail to adapt themselves to the environment will perish. They believe that man has evol

18、ved from lower forms of life. Humans are special not because God created them in His image, but because they have successfully adapted to changing environmental conditions and have passed on their survival-making characteristics genetically.Influenced by this theory, some American naturalist writers

19、 apply Darwinism as an explanation of human nature and social reality.Local Colorists(乡 土作家)Generally speaking, the writing of local colorists are concerned with the life of a small, well-defined region or province. The characteristic setting is the isolated small town.Local colorists were conscious

20、ly nostalgic historian 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 to record the facts of a local envi

21、ronment and suggested that the native life was shaped by the curious conditions of the locale.Major local colorists include Hamlin Garland, Mark Twain , Kate Chopin, etc.Theodore Dreiser (西奥多德莱塞)He is generally acknowledged as one of America literary naturalists.Works Sister Carrie 嘉莉妹妹Sister Carrie

22、tells about a poor country girl (Carrie Meeber) who goes to Chicago to pursue the American Dream.The novel shows Dreise rs naturalistic view about life by 川ustrating the purposelessness of life.The dominant symbol of the novel is the rocking chair that is the rocking chair that is indicative of the

23、uncertainty of life.Jennie Gerhardt珍妮姑娘Trilogy of Desire欲望三部曲a. The Financier金融家 b. The Titan巨人c. The Stoic斯多葛The Genius天才An American Tragedy美国的悲剧An American Tragedyis Dreisers greatest work and the title of the Book implies Dreiser intention to tell us that it is the social pressure that makes Clyd

24、e s downfall inevitable.Clydes tragedy is a tragedy that depends upon the American social system which encouraged people to pursue the dream of success, at all costs.Sherwood Anderson (舍伍德安德森)He has been called the first of Americas psychological writers because he first explored the motivations and

25、 frustrations of his fictional characters in terms of Sigmund Freuds theories of psychology.He tremendously influenced such writers as Hemingway and Faulkner.Works Winesburg, Ohio 小镇畸人Winesburg, Ohio is a collection of 23 interrelated stories of samll-town life. These stories sound morbid and grotes

26、que, but Underneath them runs a strong desire to communicate, and love and be loved.It won the author a foremost position in contemporary American literary.现代时期的美国文学The Lost Generation （迷惘的一代）The Lost Generation is a term first used by Gertrude Stein to describe the post-World War I generation of Am

27、erican writers: men and women haunted by a sense of betrayal and emptiness brought about by the destructiveness of the war.Full of youthful idealism, these individuals sought the meaning of life, drank excessively, had love affairs and created some of the finest American literature to date.The three

28、 best-know representatives of Lost Generation are F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and John Dos Passos.Others usually included among the list are Sherwood Anderson, Kay Boyle, Hart Crane, Ford Maddox Ford and Zelda Fitzgerald.Imagism （意象派诗歌）Imagism came into being in Britain ans U.S. around 191

29、0 as a reaction to the traditional English poetry to express the sense of fragmentation and dislocation.The imagists, with Ezra Pound leading the way, hold that the most effective means to express these momentary impressions is through the use of one dominant image.Imagism is characterized by the fo

30、llowing three poetic principles:direct treatment of subject matter;economy of expression;as regards rhythm, to compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in the sequence of metronome.Ezra Pounds In a Station of the Metro is a well-known imagist poem.The Beat Generation （垮掉的代）The members of t

31、he Beat Generation were new bohemian libertines, who engaged in a spontaneous, sometimes messy, creativity.The beat writers produced a body of written work controversial both for its advocacy of non-conformity and for its non-conforming style.The major beat writings are Jack Keroua c On the Roadand

32、Allen Ginsbergs Howl. Howl became the manifesto of the Beat Generation.American Dream （美国梦）American Dream refers to the dream of material success, in which one, regardless of social status, acquires wealth and gains success by working hard and good luck.In literature, the theme of American Dream rec

33、urs. In The Great Gatsby Gatsby comes from the west to the east with the dream of material success. By bootlegging and other illegal means he fulfilled his dream but ended up being killed. The novel tells the shattering of American Dream rather than its success.Expressionism 尚现主义）Expressionism refer

34、s to a movement in Germany early in the 2 th century, in which a number of painters sought to avoid the representation of external reality and, instead, to project a highly personal or subjective vision of the world.Expressionism is a reaction against realism or naturalism, aiming at presenting a po

35、st-war world violently distorted.Works noted for expressionism include: Eugene ONeills The Emperor JonesJames Joyce Ulysses and Finnegans Wake and T. S. Eliots The Waste Land etc.In a further sense, the term is sometimes applied to the belief that literary works are essentially expressions of their

36、own authors moods and thoughts; this has been the dominant assumption about literature since the rise of Romanticism.Feminism (女权主义)Feminism incorporates both a doctrine of equal rights for women and an ideology of social transformation aiming to create a world for women beyond simple social equalit

37、y.In general, feminism is the ideology of womens liberation based on the belief that women suffer injustice because of their sex. Under this broad umbrella various feminists offer differing analyses of the causes, or agents, of female oppression.Definitions of feminism by feminists tend to be shaped

38、 by their training, ideology or race. So, for example, Marxist and Socialist feminists stress the interaction within feminism of class with gender and focus on social distinctions between men and women. Black feminists argue much more for an integrated analysis which can unlock the multiple systems

39、of oppression.Hemingway Code Hero海明威式英雄)Hemingway Hero, also called code hero, is one who, wounded but strong, more sensitive, enjoys the pleasures of life (sex, alcohol, sport) in face of ruin and death, and maintains, through some notion of a code, an ideal of himself.Barnesin The Sun Also Risesde

40、nry in A Farewell to Arms and Santiago inThe Old Man and the Sea are typical of Hemingway Hero.Harlem Renaissance (合莱姆文艺复兴)Harlem Renaissance refers to a period of outstanding literary vigor and creativity that occurred in the United States during the 1920s.The Harlem Renaissance changed the images

41、of literature created by many black and white American writers. New black images were no longer obedient and docile, instead they showed a new confidence and racial pride.The leading figures are Langston Hughs, James Weldon Johnson, Wallace Thurman, etc.Impressionism 但象主义)Impressionism is a style of painting that gives the impression made by the subject on the artist withou