美国文学史及选读的名词解释(全)

美国文学 名词解释

1. American Romanticism: the literature term was first applied to the writers of the 18thcentury

in Europe who broke away from the formal rules of classical writing. When it was used in American literature it referred to the writers of the middle of the 19thcentury who stimulated（刺激） the sentimental emotions of their readers. They wrote of the mysterious of life, love, birth and death. The Romantic writers expressed themselves freely and without restraint. They wrote all kinds of materials, poetry, essays, plays, fictions, history, works of travel, and biography.

2. Transcendentalism (先验说,超越论): is a philosophic and literary movement that flourished

in New England, particular at Concord, as a reaction against Rationalism and Calvinism (理性主义and喀尔文主义). Mainly it stressed intuitive understanding of God, without the help of the church, and advocated independence of the mind. The representative writers are Emerson and Thoreau.

3. Local colorism: as a trend became dominant in American literature in the 1860s and early

1870s，it is defined by Hamlin Garland 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 stories of local colorism have a quality of circumstantial(详细的) authenticity(确实性), as local colorists tried to immortalize(使不朽) the distinctive natural, social and linguistic features. It is characteristic of vernacular(本国语) language and satirical(讽刺的) humor

4. 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. 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 an idealistic view of human nature and human experience

5. American Naturalism: American naturalism was a new and harsher realism. American

naturalism had been shaped by the war; by the social upheavals（剧变） that undermined the comforting faith of an earlier age. America’s literary naturalists dismissed the validity of comforting moral truths. They attempted to achieve extreme objectivity and frankness, presenting characters of low social and economic classes who were determined by their environment and heredity. Although naturalist literature described the world with sometimes brutal realism, it sometimes also aimed at bettering the world through social reform.

6. The Lost generation： it refers to a group of young intellectuals （知识分子） who came back

from war， were injured （受伤害） both physically （身体上） and mentally （精神上）. They lived by indulging （放任） themselves in the Bohemian （波西米亚） way of life. Their American dream was disillusioned （破灭了）. The best representative of the lost generation was Ernest Hemingway.

7. The Jazz Age :Prohibition (from 1920 to 1933) banned the sale of alcoholic drinks, resulting in illicit speakeasies becoming lively venues of the "Jazz Age. Jazz started to get a reputation as being immoral and many members of the older generations saw it as threatening the old values in culture and promoting the new decadent values of the decade

8. individualism个人主义：it is a moral political and social philosophy which emphasizes individual liberty the primary importance of the individual and the unities of self_reliance

9. Gothic ；is a literary style popular during the end of the 18th century and the beginning of the 19th.

This style usually portrayed fantastic tales dealing with horror, despair, the grotesque and other “dark” subjects. Gothic literature was named for the apparent influence of the dark gothic architecture of the period on the genre. Also, many of these Gothic tales took places in such “gothic” surroundings. Other times, this story of darkness may occur in a more everyday setting, such as the quaint house where the man goes mad from the "beating" of his guilt in Edgar Allan Poe's “The Tell-Tale Heart.” In essence, these stories were romances, largely due to their love of 10. Oversoul: an all-pervading unitary spiritual power of goodness; all things come from it and everyone is a part of it; omnipresent and omnipotent; existing in nature and in humanity alike.

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