美国文学名词解释(全的哦)

1、1. Allusion: A reference to a person, a place, an event, or a literary work that a writer expects the reader to recognize and respond to. An allusion may be drawn from history, geography, literature, or religion.2. American Naturalism:American naturalism was a new and harsher realism. American natur

2、alism had been shaped by the war; by the social upheavals that undermined the comforting faith of an earlier age. Americas literary naturalists dismissed the validity of comforting moral truths. They attempted to achieve extreme objectivity and frankness, presenting characters of low social and econ

3、omic classes 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 a

4、nd 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. Although naturalist literature described the world with sometimes brutal realism, it sometimes also aimed at bettering the world through social re

5、form.3 American Puritanism: Puritanism is the practices and beliefs of the Puritans. The Puritans were originally members of a division of the Protestant Church. The first settlers who became the founding fathers of the American nation were quite a few of them. They were a group of serious, religiou

6、s people, advocating highly religious and moral principles. As the word itself hints, Puritans wanted to purity their religious beliefs and practices. They accepted the doctrine of predestination, original sin and total depravity, and limited atonement through a special infusion of grace form God. A

7、s a culture heritage, Puritanism did have a profound influence on the early American mind. American Puritanism also had an enduring influence on American literature.4. American Realism: in American literature, the Civil War brought the Romantic Period to an end. The Age of Realism came into existenc

8、e. It came as a reaction against the lie of romanticism and sentimentalism. 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 commonplace and the low, and it offers an objective rather than

9、an idealistic view of human nature and human experience.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 were among the

10、 important factors which made literary expansion and expression not only possible but also inevitable in the period immediately following the nations political independence. Yet, romantics frequently shared certain general characteristics: moral enthusiasm, faith in value of individualism and intuit

11、ive 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 herita

12、ge and its f rontier egalitarianism.6. American Transcendentalism:Transcendentalists terrors from the romantic literature of Europe. They spoke for cultural rejuvenation and against the materialism of Americagogopirit, or the Oversoul, as the most important thing in the Universe. They stressed the i

13、mportance of the individual. To them, the individual was the most importantelement of society. They offered a fresh perception of nature as symbolic of the Spirit or God. Nature was, to them, alive, filled with Gods over whelming presence. Transcendentalism is based on the belief that the most funda

14、mental truths about life and death can be reached only by going beyond the world of the senses. Emersons Nature has been called the “Manifesto of American Transcendentalism” an d his The American Scholar has been rightly regarded as Americas “Declaration of Intellectual Independence”.7. Dramatic mon

15、ologue: A kind of narrative poem in which one character speaks to one or more listeners whose replies are not given in the poem. The occasion is usually a crucial one in the speakers personality as well as the incident that is the subject of the poem.8. Enlightenmen t: With the advent of the 18th ce

16、ntury, in England, as in other European countries, there sprang into life a public movement known as the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment on the whole, was an expression of struggle of the then progressive class of bourgeois against feudalism. The egogo inequality, stagnation, prejudices and other s

17、urvivals of feudalism. The attempted to place all branches of science at the service of mankind by connecting them with the actual deeds and requirements of the people.9. Imagism:Its a poetic movement of England and the U.S. flourished from 1909 to 1917.The movement insists on the creation of i mage

18、s in poetry by “the direct treatment of the thing” and the economy of wording. The leaders of this movement were Ezra Pound and Amy Lowell.10. Local Colorism: Local Colorism or Regionalism as a trend first made its presence felt in the late 1860s and early seventies in America. It may be defined as

19、the careful attegogoms in speech, dress or behavior peculiar to a geographical locality. The ultimate aim of the local colorists is to create the illusion of an indigenous little world with qualities that tell it apart from the world outside. The social and intellectual climate of the country provid

20、ed a stimulating milieu for the growth of local color fiction in America. 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 fo

21、rmed an important part of the realistic movement. Although it lost its momentum toward the end of the 19th century, the local spirit continued to inspire and fertilize the imagination of author.11. Lost Generation: This term has been used again and again to describe the people of the postwar years.

22、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 changing world. The young Eng

23、lish and American expatriates, men and women, were caught in the war 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, enjoying things like fishing, swimming, bullfight and beauties of nature, bu

24、t they were aware all the while that the world is crazy and meaningless and futile. Their whole life is undercut and defeated.12. Beat Generation: the Beat writers were a small group of close friends first, and a movement later. The term “Beat Generation” gradually came to represent an entire period

25、in time, but the entire original Beat Generation in literature was small enough to have fit into a couple of cars. The term was created by Jack Kerouac in 1948.The original word meant nothing mo re than “bad” or “ruined” or “spent” or “beaten-down, beaten-up and beaten-out”. The connotation is defea

26、t, resignation, and disappointment.This kind of beatness is what Kerouac was describing in himself and his friends, bright young Americans who ha d come of age during WWII but couldnt fit in as clean-cut soldiers or complacent young businessmen. They were beat because they didnt believe in straight

27、jobs and had to struggle to survive, living in dirty apartments, selling drugs or committing crimes for food money, hitchhiking across the country because they couldnt stay still without getting bored. But the term “beat” had a second meaning: beatific or sacred and holy. Kerouac, a devout Catholic,

28、 explained many times that by describing his generation as beat he was trying to capture the secret holiness of the down trodden. In fact, this is probably the most central theme in Kerouacs work.The Beats were essentially anarchic. They rejected conventional social and moral values; expressed their

29、 ali enation in their works from conventional “square” society by adopting a life style which featured sex, drugs, jazz and the freedom of the open road. Literally, the Beats were all experimenters who sought to express spontaneity of thought and feeling in a seemingly formless verse as Ginsberg did

30、 or prose as Kerouac. They tended to blur the line between poetry and prose in their writing, adopting rhythms of simple American speech and of so-called progressive jazz, so such so that the Beat style was criticized as likely to contribute more to American slang than to American letters. Perhaps i

31、n this sense they are postmodernist.13. Pre-Romanticism: It originated among the conservative groups of men and letters asa reaction against Enlightenment and found its mo st manifest expression in the “Gothic novel”. The term arising from the fact that the greater part of such romances were devoted

32、 to the medieval times.14. Psalm: A song or lyric poem in praise of God.15. Psychological Realism:It is the realistic writing that probes deeply into the complexities of characters thoughts and motivations. Henry James is considered the founder of psychological realism. His novel The Ambassadors is

33、considered to be a masterpiece of psychological realism.16. Renaissance: The term originally indicated a revival of classical (Greek and Roman arts and sciences after the dark ages of medieval obscurantism.17. Romanticism: A movement that flourished in literature, philosophy, music, and art in Weste

34、rn culture during most of the 19th century, beginnigogom.18. Satire: A kind of writing that holds up to ridicule or contempt the weaknesses and wrongdoings of individuals, groups, institutions, or humanity in general. The aim of satirists is to set a moral standard for society, and they attempt to p

35、ersuade the reader to see their point of view through the force of laughter.19. Symbol: A symbol is a sign which suggests more than its literal meaning. In other words, a symbol is both literal and figurative. A symbol is a way of telling a story and a way of conveying meaning. The best symbols are

36、those that are believable in the lives of the characters and also convincing as they convey a meaning beyond the literal level of thestory. If the symbol is obscure or ambiguous, then the very obscurity and the ambiguity may also be part of the meaning of the story.20. Symbolism: Symbolism is the wr

37、iting technique of using symbols. Its a literary movement that arose in France in the last half of the 19th century and that greatly influenced many English writers, particularly poets, of the 20th century. It enables poets to compress a very complex idea or set of ideas into one image or even one w

38、ord. Its one of the most powerful devices that poets employ in creation.21.Modernism:It was a complex and diverse international movement in all the creative arts originating about the end of the 19th century. It provided the greatest creative renaissance of the 20th century. It was made up of many f

39、acets,such as symbolism, surrealism (超现实主义,cubism (立体主义,expressionism,futurism (未来主义, ect22American Dream:American dream means the belief that everyone can succeed as long as he/she works hard enough. It usually implies a successful and satisfying life. It usually framed in terms of American capitalism(资