Terms:
1. Naturalism designates a literary movement in the late 19th and early 20th centuries in France, America and England. It applies the principles of scientific determinism or mechanism to fiction and drama. It views human beings as animals in the natural world responding to environmental forces and internal stress and drives, over none of which they have control and none of which they fully understand. Here are the major features of naturalism. (1) Humans are controlled by laws of heredity遗传 and environment. (2) The univer is cold, godless, indifferent and hostile to human desires. (3) Naturalistic writers are pessimistic. They choo their subjects from the lower ranks of the society, and portray miry and poverty of the “underdogs” who demonstrably victims of society and nature.
• Naturalism：自然主义 a new and harsher realism, 新型的更为冷峻的现实主义，产生悲观的流派 ，产生于the end of the century 十九世纪末，因为Perception of society’s disorders 对社会无序的感知。Prenting characters of low social and economic class who were do
minated by their environment and heredity. 设法尽力客观真实地展现出受环境与出身局限的下层人民和各种经济阶层人物的真正生活。
• 2、Transcendentalism 超验主义
The pha of New England Transcendentalism is the summit of American Romanticism. It was, in esnce, romanticism on Puritan soil. It was started by a group of people who were members of an informed club, i.e., the Transcendentalism Club in New England in the 1830. They expresd their views, published the journal, The Dial.
Transcendentalism has been defined philosophically as “the recognition in man of the capacity of knowing truth intuitively, or of attain knowledge transcending the reach of the ns.”Other concepts that accompanied Transcendentalism include the idea that nature is ennobling and the idea that individual is divine and therefore, lf-reliant.
• 1）as a moral philosophy, transcendentalism was neither logical nor systematized. It exalted feeling over reason, individual expression over the restraints of law and custom.不讲逻辑，不讲系统，只强调超越理性的感受，超越法律和世俗束缚的个人表达。
• 2)they spoke for cultural rejuvenation and against the materialism of American society.呼吁文化复兴，反对美国社会的拜金主义。
• 3）they believe in the transcendence of "over soul", an all-pervading power for goodness from which all things come and of which all things are a part. 相信精神上的超越，相信无所不能的善的力量，强调善为万物之源。
• 4）it could exerci a healthy and restorative influence on the human mind. “Go back to nature, sink yourlf back into its influence and you’ll become spiritually whole again.” The natural implication of all this was, of cour, that things in nature tended to become symbolic, and the physical world was a symbol of the spiritual. This in turn added to the tradition of literary symbolism in American literature.
5）代表人物：Emerson爱默生，believed that man was a part of absolute good。人性本善
Thoreau 梭 罗，beheld divinity in the “unspotted innocence” of nature. 自然才是神圣的“洁白无瑕”
5、Literary forms文学形式：Novels, short stories, and poems replaced rmons and manifestos as America’s principal literary forms.长篇小说、短篇故事和诗歌取代说教类及宣言类作品成为美国主要的文学形式。
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• 3、Lost Generation：迷惘的一代，：
• The term is applied to the American writers who fought in the First World War, voluntarily exiled to Paris, and associated with the informal literary saloon of Gertrude Stein’s Paris home for a certain period of time. They were all disillusioned with the American Tradition of writing as well as the post-war American society. The most eloquent spokesman of the group is Earnest Hemingway. Other writers are Ezra Pound , Fitzgerald, Passos,etc.
4． Beat Generation
Led by Allen Ginsberg, the Beat Movement, which began in the middle of the 1900’s, was
a revolt against the frightened, conrvative political mood, against the greedy, money-eking “respectable” life of the dominant middle class. In literature, they rejected the carefully written works of their contemporary writers. They wanted to express emotion “raw”(自发的情感), exactly as it was felt.
Analysis of the Character of Nick Carraway
If Gatsby reprents one part of Fitzgerald’s personality, the flashy celebrity who pursued and glorified wealth in order to impress the woman he loved, then Nick reprents another part: the quiet, reflective Midwesterner adrift in the lurid East. A young man (he turns thirty during the cour of the novel) from Minnesota, Nick travels to New York in 1922 to learn the bond business. He lives in the West Egg district of Long Island, next door to Gatsby. Nick is also Daisy’s cousin, which enables him to obrve and assist the resurgent love affair between Daisy and Gatsby. As a result of his relationship to the two characters, Nick is the perfect choice to narrate the novel, which functions as a personal memoir of his experiences with Gatsby in the summer of 1922.
