美国文学相关文学术语
returnsLiterary Terms about American Literature
1) American Puritanism (清教主义) : Puritanism is the practices and beliefs of puritans. The American puritans, like their English brothers, are idealists. They accept the doctrine and practice of predestination, original sin, and total depravity, and limited atonement through a special infusion of grace from God. But due to the grim struggle for living in the new continent, they become more and more practical. American Puritanism is so much a part of the national atmosphere rather than a t of tenets.
2) American Romanticism（浪漫主义）: (1) American Romanticism is one of the most important periods in the history of American literature. (2) It was a rebellion against the objectivity of rationalism. For romantics, the feelings, intuitions and emotions were more important than reason and common n. They emphasized individualism, placing the individual against the group,. They affirmed the inner life of the lf, and cherished strong interest in the past, the wild, the remote, the mysterious and the strange. They stresd the
element “Americanness” in their works. (3) It started with the publication of Washington Irving’s The Sketch Book and ended with Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. (4) Being a period of the flowering of American literature, it is also called “the American Renaissance.” (5) American Romanticists include such literary figures as Washington Irving, Ralph Waldo Emerson, William Cullen Bryant, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Poe and some others.
别字成语3) Transcendentalism（超验主义）: It refers to the religious and philosophical doctrines of Ralph Waldo Emerson and others in New England in the middle 1800’s, which emphasized the importance of individual inspirations and intuition, the Over-soul, and Nature. Other concepts that accompanied transcendentalism include the idea that nature is ennobling and the idea that the individual is divine and, therefore, lf-reliant. New England transcendentalism is the product of a combination of native American Puritanism and European Romanticism.
4) Free Ver （自由体）功权: It means the rhymed or unrhymed poetry compod without p
aying attention to conventional rules of meter. Free ver was originated by a group of French poets of the late 19外地车牌进京th century. Their purpo was to free themlves from the restrictions of formal metrical patterns and to recreate instead the free rhythms of natural speech. Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass初恋歌曲 is perhaps, the most notable example.
5) American Naturalism （自然主义）: The American naturalists accepted the more negative interpretation of Darwin’s evolutionary theory sand ud it to account for the behavior of tho characters in literary works who were regarded as more or less complex combinations of inherited attributes, their habits conditioned by social and economic forces. American naturalism is evolved from realism when the author’s tone in writing becomes less rious and less sympathetic but more ironic and more pessimistic. It is no more than a gloomy philosophical approach to reality, or to human existence. Dreir is a leading figure of this school.
6) American Realism（现实主义）: The American 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 ntimentalism. Realism turned from an emphasis on the strange toward a faithful rendering of the ordinary, a slice of life as it is really lived. American Realism express the concern for common place and the low; and it offers an objective rather an idealistic view of human nature and human experience. Realistic literature finds the drama and the tension beneath the ordinary surface of life. A realistic writer is more objective than subjective, more descriptive than symbolic. Realists look for truth in everyday truths.
7) Local Colorists (乡土作家): Generally speaking, the writings of local colorists are concerned with the life of a small, well-defined region or province. The characteristic tting is the isolated small town. Local colorists were consciously nostalgic historians of a vanishing way of life, recorders of the prent that faded before their eyes. Yet for all their ntimentality, they dedicated themlves to minutely accurate descriptions of the life of their regions. They worked from personal experience to record the facts of a local environment and suggested that the native life was shaped by the curious conditions of the local. Major colorists include Hamlin Garland, Mark Twain, Kate Chopin, etc```
8) Modernism （现代主义）:泡菜水 It was an international movement in literature and arts, especially in literary criticism, which begin in the late 19th century and the theory of psycho-analysis as its theoretical ba. The modernist writers concentrate more on the private and the subjective than on the public and objective, mainly concerned with the inner being of the individual. Therefore they pay more attention to the psychic time than the chronological one. The major themes of the modernist literature are the distorted, alienated and ill relationships between man and nature, man and society, man and man, and man and himlf. In the United States, modernism refers to the 20th century American literature, which can also be called the cond American Renaissance.
月开头成语9) The Lost Generation （迷失的一代）: It is a term first ud by Gertrude Stein to describe the post-WWI generation of American writers: man and women haunted by a n of betrayal and emptiness brought about by the destructiveness of the war. Full of idealism, the individuals sought the meaning of life, drank excessively, had love affairs and created some of the finest American literature to date. The three best-known repre
ntatives of the Lost Generation are F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and John Dos Passos.
10) The Beat Generation （垮掉的一代）: The members of the 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 none-conformity and for its non-conforming style. The major beat writings are Jack Kerouac’s On the Road and Allen Ginsberg’s Howl. Howl宋微子 became the manifesto of the Beat Generation.
