美国文学史名词解释

1. American Puritanism清教

2. It comes from the American puritans, who were the first immigrants moved to American continent in the 17th century. Original sin,

predestination（预言）

and salvation（拯救）

were the basic ideas of American Puritanism. And, hard-working, piousness（虔诚,尽职），thrift

and sobriety（清醒）

were praised.

Characteristics:

特点

1. Idealistic: Puritans pursue the purity and simplicity in worship. They focuse the glory of God, and the angry believe in the

doctrine of destiny, original sin, limited atonement

2. Practical: Puritans come to Amrican to do business and make profits with the desire of chasing wealth and status. They have to

struggle for survival under the severity of the western frontier.

3 .The struggle between the spiritual and the material is the basics of the Puritan mind. On the one hand, Puritans chase the purity of the

early the other hand, they come to America to earn money. This contradictory will be reflected by their thoughts.

4. In a word, it rests on purity, ambition, harding work, and an intense struggling for success.

3. Romanticism浪漫主义:

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.

4. 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.

5. American Realism现实主义:

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

6. Local colorism乡土文学: 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

7. Naturalism自然主义:

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.

8. Stream of consciousness意识流：It is one of the modern literary techniques. It is the style of writing that attempts to imitate the

natural flow of a character’s thoughts, feelings, reflections, memories, and mental images as the character experiences them. It was first

used in 1922 by the Irish novelist James Joyce. Those novels broke through the bounds of time and space, and depicted vividly and

skillfully the unconscious activity of the mind fast changing and flowing incessantly。

9. Modernism现代主义：It was a complex and diverse（复杂多样的） international movement in all the creative arts（创造性艺术），originating about the end of the 19th century. It provided（出现） the greatest creative renaissance of the 20th century. It was made up of

many facets

（方面）， such as symbolism，surrealism（超现实主义），

cubism（立体主义），expressionism，futurism （未来主义），ect

10. Imagism意象派:

It’s a poetic movement of England and the U.S. flourished from 1909 to movement insists on the

creation of images 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.

11. Jazz Age爵士时代:

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 Fitzgerald‘s The Great Gatsby. Highlighting what some describe as the

decadence and hedonism， as well as the growth of individualism. Fitzgerald is largely credited with coining the term“ Jazz Age”。

12. The Lost generation迷惘的一代：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.

13. Hemingway Code Hero海明威式的英雄: also called code hero，is one who，wounded but strong more sensitive，enjoys the pleasures

of life （sex，alcohol，sport） in face of ruin and death，and maintains，through some notion of a code， an ideal of himself. 2> barnes

in the sun also Rises，Henry in a Farewell to arms and Santiago in the old man and the sea are typical of Hemingway Code Hero.

14. Stream of consciousness意识流：It is one of the modern literary techniques. It is the style of writing that attempts to imitate the

natural flow of a character’s thoughts, feelings, reflections, memories, and mental images as the character experiences them. It was first

used in 1922 by the Irish novelist James Joyce. Those novels broke through the bounds of time and space, and depicted vividly and

skillfully the unconscious activity of the mind fast changing and flowing incessantly。

15. Postmodernism后现代主义:

It is a disputed term that has occupied much recent debate about contemporary culture since the early

1980s. in its simplest and least satisfactory sense it refers generally to the phase of 20th century western culture that succeeded the reign

of hign modernism，thus indicating the products of the “space age” after some time in the 1950s. More often though it is applied to a

cultural condition prevailing in the advanced capitalist societies since the 1960s，characterized by a superabundance of disconnected

images and styles. In this sense post modernity is said to be a culture of fragmentary sensations，eclectic nostalgia，disposable

simulacra，and promiscuous superficiality in which the traditionally valued qualities of depth，coherence，meaning originality and

authenticity are evacuated or dissolved amid the random swirl of empty signals.

16. American Dream美国梦: 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资本主义, its associated purported

meritocracy(知识界精华)and the freedoms guaranteed by the U.S. Bill of Rights.

17. The Harlem Renaissance哈莱姆文艺复兴：refers to the flowering of African American literature, art, and drama during the 1920s

and 1930s. Though centered in Harlem, New York, the movement impacted urban centers throughout the United States. Black novelists,

poets, painters, and playwrights began creating works rooted in their own culture instead of imitating the styles of Europeans and white

Americans.