英美文学术语解释

Humanism is both the keynote of the Renaissance and the intellectual liberation movement. Humanists took interest in human life and human activities and gave expression to the new feeling of admiration for human beauty, human achievements and human reason and passion. The English humanists in this period are Thomas More(Utopia) and dramatists such as Christopher Marlowe( The Jew of Malta),William Shakespeare(The Merchant of Venice) and Ben Jonson(V olpone).

The metaphysical poets were a loose group of British lyric poets of the 17th century, who shared an interest in metaphysical concerns and a common way of investigating them, and whose work was characterized by inventiveness of metaphor (these involved comparisons being known as metaphysical conceits).

The term 'metaphysical poetry' is commonly used to name the work of the 17th-century writers who wrote under the influence of John Donne(1572-1631),the author of A Valediction:Forbidding Mourning.

English Romanticism，as a literary movement,took place in Britain and then throughout the whole Europe between 1770 and 1832,emphasized the individual, the subiective, the irrational, the imaginative,the personal, the spontaneous, the emotional, the visionary and the transcendental.English romantic poets are Byron,Shelley(Ode to the West Wind) , Keats(Ode to a Nightingale) and so on.

English Romanticism begins in 1798 with the publication of Wordsworth and Coleridge’s The Lyrical Ballads and ends in 1832 with Walter Scott’s death.

English Romanticism is a revolt of the English imagination against the neoclassical reason. The French Revolution of 1789-1794 and the English Industrial Revolution exert great influence on English Romanticism.

The romanticists express a negative attitude towards the existing social or political conditions. They place the individual at the center of art, as can be seen from Lord Byron’s Byronic Hero. The key words of English Romanticism are nature and imagination. They argue that poetry should be free from all rules.

The Victorian Age is an age of realism rather than of romanticism-a realism which strives to tell the whole truth showing moral & physical diseases as they are. To be true to life becomes the first requirement for literary writing. As the mirror of truth, literature has come very close to daily life, reflecting its practical problems & interests & is used as a powerful instrument of human progress.

Critical Realism

Critical Realism is a term applied to the realistic fiction in the late19th and early20th centuries.It means the tendency of writers and intellectuals in the period between1875and1920to apply the methods of realistic fiction to the criticism of society and the examination of social issues.Realist writers were all concerned about the fate of the common people and described what was faithful to

reality.The most important critical realist is Charles Dickens(Oliver Twist). The English critical realists of the nineteenth century vividly portray the evils of the upper classes in the bourgeois society as well as the misery of the lower classes.

But these writers do not find a way to eradicate the social evils. They often begin their works with a powerful exposure of the ugliness of the bourgeois society but end with happy endings or impotent compromise.

Theater of the Absurd

It is famous for its anti-drama qualities. It has no main plot. The characters lack a necessary social and personal background. They are deprived of any personality. Language fails to act as a means of true communication. These broken images reflect the debased position of modern man in the post-industrial society in a symbolic way.The representative is Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. Transcendentalism is the summit of the Romantic Movement in the history of American literature in the 19th century. Transcendentalism has been defined philosophically as “the recognition in man of the capacity of knowing truth intuitively or “of attaining knowledge transcending the reach of the senses”.

In other words, transcendentalists believe that man learns things not only through reasoning based on his five senses, or by his own sensual experiences, and that he also learns truth spontaneously, out of his soul or instincts.

In a literal sense, it means the belief that knowledge and principles of reality can be obtained by studying thought, not necessarily by practical experiences. In this sense the term is almost synonymous with the word mysticism.Transcendentalists place emphasis on the importance of the Over-soul, the individual and Nature.The most important representatives are Ralph Waldo Emerson (Nature) and Henry David Thoreau (Walden).

American Realism :It refers to a literary movement that sprang up in the latter half of the 19th century in the United States. It is the theory of writing in which familiar aspects of contemporary life and everyday scenes are represented in a straightforward or matter-of-fact manner.It stresses truthful treatment of material.The representatives are Mark Twain(The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn) and Henry James(Daisy Miller).

American Naturalism，as a literary movement, grew out of 19th century realism. It wanted to tell the whole truth about life and to represent contemporary reality faithfully.Dreiser’s Sister Carrie, S.Anderson’s Winesburg,Ohio and S.Lewis’s Main Street are representatives.

Naturalism is a term created by Emile Zola, attempted to achieve extreme objectivity and frankness;Naturalism is a more deliberate kind of realism in novels, stories, and plays, usually involving a view of human beings as passive victims of natural forces and social environment (a pessimistic form of realism, a new and harsher realism);

It appeared in America at the end of the 19th century. Naturalist writers turned literary creation into a mechanical record of society, in a way of attempting to achieve extreme objectivity and frankness. They never made comments on the characters and their behaviors. The characters were often figures of low social and economic classes, with animal desire, some physically strong but weak-willed figures. There were also some healthy and lofty persons, but their ending were miserable.The viewpoint from which the writers understood problems was amoral, or non-moral. They stressed men had no free will, their lives were controlled by heredity and environment.Their material was infinite.

Imagism

It is a Movement in U.S. and English poetry characterized by the use of concrete language and figures of speech, modern subject matter, metrical freedom, and avoidance of romantic or mystical themes, aiming at clarity of expression through the use of precise visual images. It grew out of the Symbolist Movement in 1912 and was initially led by Ezra Pound(In a Station of the Metro).