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美国文学名词解释
《美国文学》名词解释
1. American Puritanism
American Puritanism was one of the most enduring shaping
influences in American thought and American literature. It has
become, to some extent, so much a state of mind, rather than a
set of tenets, so much a part of the national cultural atmosphere
that the Americans breathe. It stresses predestination, original sin,
total depravity, and limited atonement (or the salvation of a
selected few) from God’s grac e. With such doctrines in their
minds, Puritans left Europe for America in order to establish a
theocracy in the New World. Over the years in the new homeland
they built a way of life that stressed hard work, thrift, piety, and
sobriety.
2. The American Dream
The American Dream is the faith held by many in the United
States of America that through hard work, courage, and
determination one can achieve a better life for oneself, usually
through financial prosperity. These were values held by many
early European settlers, and have been passed on to subsequent
generations. Nowadays the American Dream has led to an
emphasis on material wealth as a measure of success and/or
happiness.
3. American Romanticism
American Romanticism stretches from the end of the 18th
century through the outbreak of the Civil War. It was America’s
first great creative period. Although foreign influences were
strong, American romanticism exhibited distinct features of its
own. First, American romanticism was in essence the expression
of “a real new experience” and contained “an alien quality”
for the simple reason that “the spirit of the place” was radically
new and alien. Second, Puritan influence over American
romanticism was conspicuously noticeable. Famous writers, such
as the novelists Hawthorne and Melville; the poets Dickinson and
Whitman; the essayists Thoreau and Emerson, had made a great
literary period by capturing on their pages the enthusiasm and
the optimism of that dream.
4. American Transcendentalism
American Transcendentalism is literature, philosophical and
literary movement that flourished in New England from about
1836 to 1860. It originated among a small group of intellectuals
who were reacting against the orthodoxy of Calvinism and the
rationalism of the Unitarian Church, developing instead their own
faith centering on the divinity of humanity and the natural world.
The beliefs that God is imminent in each person and in nature
and that individual intuition is the highest source of knowledge
led to an optimistic emphasis on individualism, self-reliance, and
rejection of traditional authority. The ideas of transcendentalism
were most eloquently expressed by Ralph Waldo Emerson in such
essays as Nature(1836), and Self-Reliance and by Henry David
Thoreau in his book Walden (1854).
5. American Naturalism
American Naturalism is a literary movement that became
popular in America in the late 19th century and is often
associated with literary realism. Viewed as a combination of
realism and romanticism, critics contend that the American form
is heavily influenced by the concept of determinism—the theory
that heredity and environment influence and determine human
behavior. Although naturalism is often associated with realism,
which also seeks to accurately represent human existence, the
two movements are differentiated by the fact that naturalism is
connected to the doctrine of biological, economic and social
determinism. Representative writers are, among others, Stephen
Crane and Theodore Dreiser.
6. International Theme
The International theme was one of Henry James’s main
subjects, which dealt with the relationship between American
and European culture. He explored the attractions and conflicts
between new and old, innocence and experience, candor and
complexity, the puritanical and the aesthetic.
7. Local Colorism
Local Colorism is a type of writing that was popular in the
late 19th century, particularly among authors in the South of the
United States. This style relied heavily on using words, phrases,
and slang that were native to the particular region in which the
story took place. The term has come to mean any device which
implies a specific focus, whether it is geographical or temporal.
A well-known local colorism author was Mark Twain with his
books Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
8. Imagism
Imagism was a literary movement which came into being in
Britain and U.S. around 1910 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 following three poetic principles: i) direct
treatment of subject matter; ii) economy of expression; iii) as
regard rhythm, to compose in the sequence of the musical
phrase, not in the sequence of metronome. Ezra Pound’s “In a
Station of the Metro” is a well-known imagist poem.
9. Harlem Renaissance
Harlem Renaissance is a notable phase of black American
writing centered in Harlem (a predominantly black area of New
York City) in the 1920s. It brought a new self-awareness and
critical respect to black literature in the US. Langston Hughes and
Richard Wright are representatives of the movement with their
works Weary Blues and Native Son respectively.
10. The Lost Generation
The term Lost Generation was coined by Gertrude Stein to
refer to a group of American literary notables who lived in Paris
from the time period which saw the end of World War I to the
beginning of the Great Depression. Significant members included
Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound, Sherwood
Anderson, T. S. Eliot, and Gertrude Stein herself. Hemingway likely
popularized the term, quoting Stein ( “You are all a lost
generation” ) as epigraph to his novel, The Sun Also Rises. More
generally, the term is being used for the young adults of Europe
and America during World War I. They were “lost” because
after the war many of them were disillusioned with the world in
general and unwilling to move into a settled life.
11. The Jazz Age
The Jazz Age describes the period of the 1920s and 1930s,
the years between World War I and World War II, particularly in
North America; with the rise of the Great Depression, the values
of this age saw much decline. Perhaps the most representative
literary work of the age is American writer F. Scott Fitzgerald’s
The Great Gatsby, highlighting what some describes as the
decadence and hedonism, as well as the growth of individualism.
Fi tzgerald is largely credited with coining the term “The Jazz
Age”.
12. Hemingway (Code) Heroes
The works of Ernest Hemingway generally center on the
concept of heroism. Each of his novels contains a “Hemingway
hero”— a man of honor and integrity who expresses himself not
with words, but with actions. The Hemingway hero is a noble but
tragic hero fighting with the overwhelming force; though he
knows that he will be defeated at last, he decides to act like a
hero. He is not a Godlike figure, but an ordinary, often flawed
mortal who must look to himself for strength. The Hemingway
hero is actually a mirror image of the author himself. Santiago in
The Old Man and the Sea is a typical Hemingway hero.
13. The Beat Generation
In the 1950s, there was a widespread discontent among the
postwar generation, whose voice was one of protest against all
the mainstream culture that America had come to represent. This
has come to be known as the Beat Generation. The word “beat”
represented a non-conformist, rebellious attitude toward
conventional values concerning sex, religion, the arts, and the
American way of life. It was an attitude that resulted from the
feeling of depression and exhaustion and the need to escape into
an unconvention al, sometimes communal, mode of living.
Central elements of “Beat” culture included experimentation
with drugs, alternative forms of sexuality, an interest in Eastern
religion, a rejection of materialism, and the idealizing of
exuberant, unexpurgated means of expression and being.
Allen Ginsberg’s Howl (1956), William S. Burroughs’s
Naked Lunch (1959) and Jack Kerouac’s On the Road (1957) are
among the best known examples of Beat literature.
14. Black Humor
Black humor, in literature, drama, and film, grotesque or
morbid humor, used to express the absurdity, insensitivity,
paradox, and cruelty of the modern world. Ordinary characters or
situations are usually exaggerated far beyond the limits of
normal satire or irony. Black humor uses devices often associated
with tragedy and is sometimes equated with tragic farce. Joseph
Heller’s Catch-22 is one of the kind.
15. The Southern Renaissance
The Southern Renaissance is the revival of American
Southern literature that began in the 1920s and 1930s until the
1950s. Much of the writings in this unit featured the struggle
between those who embraced social changes and those who
were more skeptical or challenged social change outright. The
writers and intellectuals of the South after the late 1920s were
engaged in an attempt to come to terms not only with the
inherited values of the Southern tradition, but also with a certain
way of perceiving and dealing with the past. In the works of
William Faulkner, Katherine Ann Porter, Allen Tate, and Tennessee
Williams, among others, the diverse wealth of voices in the early
20th-century South came alive.
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