美国文学史名词解释

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名词解释,美国,文学史
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1. Modernism: a general term applied retrospectively to the wide range of experimental and avant-garde trends in the literature and other arts of the early 20th century, including symbolism, futurism, expressionism, imagism, Dada, and surrealism, along with the innovations of related writers. Modernist literature is characterized chiefly by a rejection of 19th-century traditions. Modernist writers tended to see themselves as an avant-garde departed with bourgeois values, and disturbed their readers by adopting complex and difficult new forms and styles.Modernist writers often write with an awareness of new anthropological and psychological theories.

Mark Twain: follow realism. pseudonym of Samuel Langhorne Clemens American humorist, writer, and lecturer who won a worldwide audience for his stories of youthful adventures, especially The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), Life on the Mississippi (1883), and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884). Writing in American colloquialism and subjects with humors and satires, Mark Twain shed great influence upon later writers such as Sherwood Anderson, Earnest Hemingway and Faulkner. Major works:

Naturalism: American naturalism was a new and harsher realism. American naturalism had been shaped by the war; by the social upheavals 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 sth brutal realism, it sometimes also aimed at bettering the world through social reform. Stephen Crane

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 authenticity, as local colorists tried to immortalize the distinctive natural, social and linguistic features. It is characteristic of vernacular language and satirical humor. Generally speaking, the writings of local colorists are concerned with the life of a small, well-defined region or province. The characteristic setting is the isolated small town.

Henry James: One of America’s major novelist and critics.“the historian of fine consciences”. Style: Psychological Realism, Narrative Technique, showing vs. Telling, omniscience vs. limited omniscience and Center of consciousness. Three Stages of James’s Literary Career: International theme, Experimental stage and “Major Phase” which he returns to the international theme. Major works: The American (1877), Daisy Miller (1878), The Portrait of a Lady (1881), The Bostonians (1886), The Princess Casamassima (1886), What Maisie Knew (1897), The Turn

of the Screw (1898), The Wings of the Dove (1902), The Ambassadors (1903), and The Golden Bowl (1904)

6. Stephen Crane: naturalist/ Maggie, A Girl of the Streets, which is Crane’s first novel and the first naturalistic novel written by an American. Representative of American literary naturalism, Precursor of imagist poetry, Considered by his contemporaries the best reporter of war. Crane is also an excellent short story writer. “The Open Boat”, “The Blue Hotel” and “The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky” are his best pieces. Crane’s Artistic Features: Isolated immediate moments; Feelings that exist in immediate experience; Direct and simple syntax; Symbols ; Irony ; Detached and scientific observer’s point of view; Vivid color, animal imagery, stereotyped characters, colloquial English and straightforward narration

7. 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. The Lost Generation:

The term “Lost Generation” was first used by Gertrude Stein (1874-1946), one of the leaders of this group. It included the young English and American expatriates as well as men and women 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. It means this generation had lost the beautiful sense of the calm idyllic past. Stein’s comment suggests the ambiguous and pointless lives of expatriates as they aimlessly wandered about the Continent, drinking, making love, traveling from place to place and from party to party. These activities seem to justify their search for new meanings to replace the old ones. Yet in fact, being cut off from their past, disillusioned in reality, and without a meaningful future to fall on, they were lost in disillusionment and existential voids. They indulged in hedonism in order to make their life less unbearable.

9. Iceberg theory: If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water.”(His writing is minimalist and sparse, with few adverbs or adjectives. He includes only essential information, often omitting background information, transitions, and dialogue tags such as “he said” or “she said. He often uses pronouns without clear antecedents.

10. The Roaring Twenties is a phrase used to describe the 1920s, principally in North

America, but also in London, Berlin and Paris for a period of sustained economic prosperity. The phrase was meant to emphasize the period's social, artistic, and cultural dynamism. "Normalcy" returned to politics in the wake of World War I, jazz music blossomed, the flapper redefined modern womanhood, Art Deco peaked, and finally the Wall Street Crash of 1929 served to punctuate the end of the era, as the Great Depression set in. The era was further distinguished by several inventions and discoveries of far-reaching importance, unprecedented industrial growth, accelerated consumer demand and aspirations, and significant changes in lifestyle and culture.