美国文学名词解释

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Transcendentalism: It is a philosophical view, a notion, a concept, an idea, a way of looking

at things, a set of attitudes about man, God, and the universe, a way of how to get to the basic truth of the universe. Transcendentalism was neither logical nor systematized. It exalted feeling over reason, individual expression over the restraints of law and custom. 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. Representatives are Emerson，believed that man was a part of absolute good, Thoreau，beheld divinity in the “unspotted innocence” of nature. American Romanticism:①Romanticism was a rebellion against the objectivity of

rationalism. For romantics, the feelings, intuitions and emotions were more important than reason and common sense. They stressed the close relationship between man and nature, emphasized individualism and affirmed the inner life of the self. ②American writers shared some common features with the English Romanticists, while American romanticism exhibited from the very outset distinct features of its own.③ The American Puritanism as a cultural heritage exerted great influences over American moral values. ④American romantics tended more to moralize rather than to entertain.⑤Romantic values were prominent in American politics, art, and philosophy until the Civil War.





American Puritanism: The “Puritan” was “a would-be purifier”. Puritans wanted to make

pure their religious beliefs and practices, and believed that God decides everything and they are God’s chosen people. Their purposes are for religious freedom and political freedom. Hard work, thrift, piety, and sobriety were the Puritan spirit that dominated much of the earliest American writing (including the sermons, books, and letters of such noted Puritan clergyman as John Cotton and Cotton Mather). The major intellectual spokesmen of Puritanism are John Cotton, Roger Williams. Naturalism: A new and harsher realism, a view of human beings as passive victims of natural

forces and social environment. The naturalists emphasized that the world was amoral, that men and women had no free will, that their lives were controlled by heredity and the environment; the religious “truths” were illusory, that the destiny of humanity was misery in life and oblivion in death. Representatives are：Stephen Crane, Frank Norris, Jack London , Theodore Dreiser Realism: It appeared in the United States in the literature of local color, an amalgam of romantic plots and realistic descriptions of things was immediately observable. The dialects, customs, sights. Important figures of realism: William Howells; Hamlin Garland; Mark Twain; Henry James Free verse：A kind of poetry that doesn’t’t conform to any regular meter and rhyme.The difference between free verse and blank verse is that blank verse has no rhyme, but it should be iambic pentameter. Lost Generation：① It refers to the post-World War I generation, but specifically a group of expatriates who left America and formed a community of writers and artists in Paris, involved with other European novelists and poets in their experimentation on new modes of thought and expression. ②The term stems from a remark made by Gertrude Stein to Ernest Hemingway, “You are all a lost generation”, of which Hemingway used “the Lost Generation” as an epigram to The Sun Also Rises. ③ The generation was “lost” in the sense that its inherited values were no longer relevant in the postwar world because of its spiritual alienation from a U. S. that seemed to its members to be hopelessly provincial, materialistic and emotional barren. ④The term embraces Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Pound, Williams, and many other writers who made Paris the center of their literary activities in the 1920s Deism: is a religious philosophy and movement that derives the existence and nature of God from reason and personal experience. Emersonian Transcendentalist: ①It is actually a philosophical school which absorbed some ideological concerns of American Puritanism and European Romanticism, with its




focus on the intuitive knowledge of human beings to grasp the absolute in the universe and the divinity of man.②Ralph Emerson bases his religion on an intuitive belief in an ultimate unity, which he calls “over-soul.” He believes that there should be emotional communication between an individual soul and the universal “over-soul.”③Ralph Emerson puts stress on the ideal individual, a self-reliant man, who ④For Ralph Emerson, nature is emblematic of the spiritual world, alive with God’s overwhelming presence; hence, it exercises a healthy and restorative influence on human mind.

Enlightenment and American Revolution: 1). all the leaders of the revolution were influenced by the Enlightenment, representatives: Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson, etc. 2). The new nation was set on the basic ideas and principles of the Enlightenment. Enlightenment：1).an intellectual movement 2)the power of human reason 3)the scientific idea;4)the idea of progress Modernism：It is loosely a synonym of anything contemporary. Strictly, especially in literary criticism, this began in the late 19th century and the theory of psycho-analysis as its theoretical base. They pay more attention to the psychic time than the chronological one. 现代主义的标志：T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land Romanticism Characteristics: Romantics frequently shared certain general characteristics: moral enthusiasm, faith in the value of individualism and intuitive perception, and a presumption that the natural world was a source of goodness and man’s societies a source of corruption Local colorism: Realism first appeared in the United States in the literature of local color, an amalgam of romantic plots and realistic descriptions of things was immediately observable; the dialects, customs, sights, and sounds of regional America. Bret Harte was the first American writer of local color to achieve wide popularity, presenting stories of western mining towns with colorful gamblers, outlaws, and scandalous women. Harte, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Kate Chopin, Joel Chandler Harris, and Mark Twain provided regional stories and tales of the life of America’s Westerners, Southerners, and Easterners. Local color fiction reached its peak of popularity in the 1880s, but by the turn of the century it had begun to decline. How does Sister Carrie embody Dreiser’s naturalistic belief? ①In this novel, Dreiser expressed his naturalistic pursuit by expounding the purposelessness of life and attacking the conventional moral standards. ②The novel best embodies his naturalistic belief that while men are controlled by heredity, instinct and chance, a few extraordinary and unsophisticated human beings refuse to accept their fate wordlessly and instead strive, unsuccessfully, to find meaning and purpose for their existence. ③To Sister Carrie, the world is cold and harsh. Alone, helpless, she moves along like a mechanism driven by desire and catches blindly at any opportunities for a better existence, opportunities first offered by Drouet, and then by Hurstwood. A feather in the wind, she was totally at the mercy of forces she cannot comprehend, still less to say control. The famous picture of Carrie sitting in a rocking chair in her room in the evening, rocking back and forth, is a picture of Carrie’s drifting with the tide. She has no control, no freedom of will.

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