美国文学选读名词解释

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2024年5月23日发(作者：)

1. Puritanism (清教主义)

：

Puritanism is the practices and beliefs of the

Puritans.

1. ) simply speaking , American Puritanism just refers to the spirit and ideal of

puritans,who settled in the North American continent in the early part of the

seventeenth century because of religious persecutions.

2. )In content it means scrupulous ,moral rigor ,eapecially hostility to social

pleasure and religion .

3. )with time passing it became a dominant factor in American life , one of the

most enduring shaping influences in American thought and literature .to some

extentit is a state of mind , a part of the national cultural atmosphere that the

American breathes ,rather than a set of tenets.

4. ) Actually it is a code of values , a philosophy of life and a point of view in

American minds , also a two-faceted tradition of religious idealism and level -

headed in common sense .

5) Major topic:American Puritanism Introduction

There were no written literature among the more than 500 different Indian

languages and tribal cultures, American writing began with the work of

English adventurers and colonists in the New World chiefly for the benefit of

readers in the mother country.

Therefore the writing in this period was essentially two kinds:

(1) practical matter-of-fact accounts of farming, hunting, travel, etc.

designed to inform people “at home” what life was like in the new

world, and, often, to induce their immigration;

(2) highly theoretical, generally polemical^辩的)

，

discussions of religious

questions.

2. The American Romanticism(浪 漫主义

)

I. What is Romanticism a literary movement flourished as a cultural force the

early period and the late period.

associated with imagination and boundlessness, as an historical movement it

arose in the 18th and 19th centuries. The most clearly defined romantic literary

movement in the U. S.A was Transcendentalism.

Washington Irving and James Fenimore Cooper, and those of the late period

contain Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman,

Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Edgar Allan Poe.

□.Features of American romanticism

（1） It was the expression of “a real new experience（全 新体验）”.

（2） American Puritanism was a cultural heritage. Many American

romantic writings intended to edify（启发）more than they entertained.

⑶

American Romanticism is full of “newness（新奇）”. Ideals：

Individualism; political equality Dream： America: a new Garden of Eden

（4） American romanticism was both imitative and independent.

3..transcendentalism、（超验主义）transcendentalism: It stressed the power of

intuition, believing that people could learn things both from the outside world by

means of the five senses and from the inner world by intuition. It took nature as

symbolic of spirit or God. All things in nature were symbols of the spiritual, of

God’s presence. It emphasized the significance of the individual and believed that

the individual was the most important element in society and that the ideal kind

of individual was self-reliant and unselfish. Transcendentalists envisioned

religion as an emotional communication between an individual soul and the

universal “Oversoul”.

lism: It views human beings as animals in the natural world responding

to environmental forces and internal stresses and drives, over none of which they

have control and none of which they fully understand. The literary naturalists

have a major difference from the realists. They look at a different spot to find

real life.

5. Free verse: It is poetry that has an irregular rhythm and line length and

that attempts to avoid any predetermined verse structure; instead, it uses the

cadences of natural speech. ational novel: IN brings together persons of

various nationalities who represent certain characteristics of their own

countries.

7. the lost generation: reveals the huge destruction of the wars to the young

generation. It describes the Americans who remained in Paris as a colony

of “expatriates”. They were lost in disillusionment.

8. American Dream: 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

9. American Realism: 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 .

10. Black Humor:also called Black Comedy, writing that juxtaposes morbid or

ghastly elements with comical ones. The term did not come into common use

until the 1960s. Then it was applied to the works of the novelists Nathanael

West, Vladimir Nabokov, and Joseph Heller. The latter's Catch-22 （1961） is

a notable example, in which Captain Yossarian battles the horrors of air

warfare over the Mediterranean during World War II with hilarious

irrationalities matching the stupidities of the military system. The term black

comedy has been applied to playwrights in the Theatre of the Absurd.

11. 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（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

12. Code Hero

General Features:

1. He has great physical potential and courage.

2. The “ code heroes ” have strong willpower.

3. Thirdly , another important feature of the “code heroes" is their loyalty.

4. Fourthly , the" code heroes "maintain great dignity in all situations.

5. Fifthly , the “code heroes ” are endowed with certain specialized skills , such

as fishing , bull fighting , and hunting , etc

6. the “code heroes "are always put in some touch-and go situations, what the

heroes must always face up to is their own personal fear of death and the threat

of destruction, and it is this obstacle, death, that they have to overcome.

g theory:

The dignity of movement of the iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being

above water.

2 American Transcendentalism

As a philosophical and literary movement, American Transcendentalism

（also known as “ American Renaissance"） flourished in New England from

the 1830s to the Civil War. It is the high tide of American romanticism and its

doctrines found their greatest literary advocates in Emerson and Thoreau.

Transcendentalists spoke for the cultural rejuvenation and against the

materialism of American society.

Transcendentalism 超验主义（+ H. D. Thoreau; Nathaniel

Hawthorne;)

The major features of Transcendentalism:

① The Transcendentalists placed emphasis on spirit, or the Oversoul, as the

most important thing in the universe. 思想 超灵 宇宙

② The Transcendentalists stressed the importance of the individual. To them,

the individual is the most important element of Society.个体+社会

③ The Transcendentalists offered a fresh perception of nature as symbolic of

the Spirit or God. Nature was not purely matter. It was alive, filled with God’s

overwhelming presence.自然+上帝

3 Stream of Consciousness 意识流 or “interior monologue”,内心独 白 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.

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