美国文学名词解释

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美国文学名词解释

《美国文学》名词解释

1. American Puritanism

American Puritanism was one of the most enduring shaping

influences in American thought and American literature. It has

become, to some extent, so much a state of mind, rather than a

set of tenets, so much a part of the national cultural atmosphere

that the Americans breathe. It stresses predestination, original sin,

total depravity, and limited atonement (or the salvation of a

selected few) from God’s grac e. With such doctrines in their

minds, Puritans left Europe for America in order to establish a

theocracy in the New World. Over the years in the new homeland

they built a way of life that stressed hard work, thrift, piety, and

sobriety.

2. The American Dream

The American Dream is the faith held by many in the United

States of America that through hard work, courage, and

determination one can achieve a better life for oneself, usually

through financial prosperity. These were values held by many

early European settlers, and have been passed on to subsequent

generations. Nowadays the American Dream has led to an

emphasis on material wealth as a measure of success and/or

happiness.

3. American Romanticism

American Romanticism stretches from the end of the 18th

century through the outbreak of the Civil War. It was America’s

first great creative period. Although foreign influences were

strong, American romanticism exhibited distinct features of its

own. First, American romanticism was in essence the expression

of “a real new experience” and contained “an alien quality”

for the simple reason that “the spirit of the place” was radically

new and alien. Second, Puritan influence over American

romanticism was conspicuously noticeable. Famous writers, such

as the novelists Hawthorne and Melville; the poets Dickinson and

Whitman; the essayists Thoreau and Emerson, had made a great

literary period by capturing on their pages the enthusiasm and

the optimism of that dream.

4. American Transcendentalism

American Transcendentalism is literature, philosophical and

literary movement that flourished in New England from about

1836 to 1860. It originated among a small group of intellectuals

who were reacting against the orthodoxy of Calvinism and the

rationalism of the Unitarian Church, developing instead their own

faith centering on the divinity of humanity and the natural world.

The beliefs that God is imminent in each person and in nature

and that individual intuition is the highest source of knowledge

led to an optimistic emphasis on individualism, self-reliance, and

rejection of traditional authority. The ideas of transcendentalism

were most eloquently expressed by Ralph Waldo Emerson in such

essays as Nature(1836), and Self-Reliance and by Henry David

Thoreau in his book Walden (1854).

5. American Naturalism

American Naturalism is a literary movement that became

popular in America in the late 19th century and is often

associated with literary realism. Viewed as a combination of

realism and romanticism, critics contend that the American form

is heavily influenced by the concept of determinism—the theory

that heredity and environment influence and determine human

behavior. Although naturalism is often associated with realism,

which also seeks to accurately represent human existence, the

two movements are differentiated by the fact that naturalism is

connected to the doctrine of biological, economic and social

determinism. Representative writers are, among others, Stephen

Crane and Theodore Dreiser.

6. International Theme

The International theme was one of Henry James’s main

subjects, which dealt with the relationship between American

and European culture. He explored the attractions and conflicts

between new and old, innocence and experience, candor and

complexity, the puritanical and the aesthetic.

7. Local Colorism

Local Colorism is a type of writing that was popular in the

late 19th century, particularly among authors in the South of the

United States. This style relied heavily on using words, phrases,

and slang that were native to the particular region in which the

story took place. The term has come to mean any device which

implies a specific focus, whether it is geographical or temporal.

A well-known local colorism author was Mark Twain with his

books Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

8. Imagism

Imagism was a literary movement which came into being in

Britain and U.S. around 1910 as a reaction to the traditional

English poetry to express the sense of fragmentation and

dislocation. The imagists, with Ezra Pound leading the way, hold

that the most effective means to express these momentary

impressions is through the use of one dominant image. Imagism

is characterized by the following three poetic principles: i) direct

treatment of subject matter; ii) economy of expression; iii) as

regard rhythm, to compose in the sequence of the musical

phrase, not in the sequence of metronome. Ezra Pound’s “In a

Station of the Metro” is a well-known imagist poem.

9. Harlem Renaissance

Harlem Renaissance is a notable phase of black American

writing centered in Harlem (a predominantly black area of New

York City) in the 1920s. It brought a new self-awareness and

critical respect to black literature in the US. Langston Hughes and

Richard Wright are representatives of the movement with their

works Weary Blues and Native Son respectively.

10. The Lost Generation

The term Lost Generation was coined by Gertrude Stein to

refer to a group of American literary notables who lived in Paris

from the time period which saw the end of World War I to the

beginning of the Great Depression. Significant members included

Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound, Sherwood

Anderson, T. S. Eliot, and Gertrude Stein herself. Hemingway likely

popularized the term, quoting Stein ( “You are all a lost

generation” ) as epigraph to his novel, The Sun Also Rises. More

generally, the term is being used for the young adults of Europe

and America during World War I. They were “lost” because

after the war many of them were disillusioned with the world in

general and unwilling to move into a settled life.

11. The Jazz Age

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 F. Scott Fitzgerald’s

The Great Gatsby, highlighting what some describes as the

decadence and hedonism, as well as the growth of individualism.

Fi tzgerald is largely credited with coining the term “The Jazz

Age”.

12. Hemingway (Code) Heroes

The works of Ernest Hemingway generally center on the

concept of heroism. Each of his novels contains a “Hemingway

hero”— a man of honor and integrity who expresses himself not

with words, but with actions. The Hemingway hero is a noble but

tragic hero fighting with the overwhelming force; though he

knows that he will be defeated at last, he decides to act like a

hero. He is not a Godlike figure, but an ordinary, often flawed

mortal who must look to himself for strength. The Hemingway

hero is actually a mirror image of the author himself. Santiago in

The Old Man and the Sea is a typical Hemingway hero.

13. The Beat Generation

In the 1950s, there was a widespread discontent among the

postwar generation, whose voice was one of protest against all

the mainstream culture that America had come to represent. This

has come to be known as the Beat Generation. The word “beat”

represented a non-conformist, rebellious attitude toward

conventional values concerning sex, religion, the arts, and the

American way of life. It was an attitude that resulted from the

feeling of depression and exhaustion and the need to escape into

an unconvention al, sometimes communal, mode of living.

Central elements of “Beat” culture included experimentation

with drugs, alternative forms of sexuality, an interest in Eastern

religion, a rejection of materialism, and the idealizing of

exuberant, unexpurgated means of expression and being.

Allen Ginsberg’s Howl (1956), William S. Burroughs’s

Naked Lunch (1959) and Jack Kerouac’s On the Road (1957) are

among the best known examples of Beat literature.

14. Black Humor

Black humor, in literature, drama, and film, grotesque or

morbid humor, used to express the absurdity, insensitivity,

paradox, and cruelty of the modern world. Ordinary characters or

situations are usually exaggerated far beyond the limits of

normal satire or irony. Black humor uses devices often associated

with tragedy and is sometimes equated with tragic farce. Joseph

Heller’s Catch-22 is one of the kind.

15. The Southern Renaissance

The Southern Renaissance is the revival of American

Southern literature that began in the 1920s and 1930s until the

1950s. Much of the writings in this unit featured the struggle

between those who embraced social changes and those who

were more skeptical or challenged social change outright. The

writers and intellectuals of the South after the late 1920s were

engaged in an attempt to come to terms not only with the

inherited values of the Southern tradition, but also with a certain

way of perceiving and dealing with the past. In the works of

William Faulkner, Katherine Ann Porter, Allen Tate, and Tennessee

Williams, among others, the diverse wealth of voices in the early

20th-century South came alive.

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