二十世纪英美文学流派名词解释

1、stream of consciousness

The continuous flow of sense, perceptions, thoughts, feelings, and memories in the human mind; or a literary method of representing such a blending of mental processes in fictional characters, usually in an unpunctuated or disjointed form of interior monologue.

The term is often used as a synonym for interior monologue, but they can also be distinguished, in two ways. In the first (psychological) sense, the stream of consciousness is the subject-matter while interior monologue is the technique for presenting it;

2、The Theatre of the Absurd

A term coined by the critic Martin Esslin in 1961 to refer to a number of dramatists of the 1950s. The theatre of the absurd came about as a reaction to World War II. It took the basis of existential philosophy and combined it with dramatic elements to create a style of theatre which presented a world which can not be logically explained, and in which life is in one word, ABSURD!

3、Existentialism

A current in European philosophy distinguished by its emphasis on lived human existence. Although it had an important precursor先驱on the Danish theologian神学者Kierkegaard in the 1840s, its impact was fully felt only in the mid-20th century in France and Germany: the German philosophers Martin Heidegger and Karl Jaspers prepared some of the ground in the 1920s and 1930s for the more influential work of Jean-Paul Sartre and the other French existentialists including Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty.

4、The Lost Generation

(Also termed the Sad Young Men, which was created by F. Scott Fitzgerald in his book All the Sad Young Men.) In general, the term refers to the post-World War I generation, but specifically a group of U. S. writers who came of age成年,够岁数了during the war and established their literary reputations in the 1920s. It seems from a remark made by Gertrude Stein to Ernest Hemingway, “You are all a lost generation.” Hemingway used it as an epigraph题词to The Sun Also Rises (1926), a novel that captures the attitudes of a hard-drinking, fast-living set of disillusioned young expatriates放弃本国国籍的人in postwar Paris.

The generation was “lost” in the sense that its spiritual alienation from a U. S. that, basking under President Harding’s “back to normalcy常态” policy, seem ed to its members to be hopelessly provincial, materialistic, and emotionally barren. The term embraces Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Dos Passos, E. E. Cummings, and many other writers who made Paris the center of their literary activities in the 1920s. They were never a literary school. In the 1930s, as these writers turned in different directions, their works lost the distinctive stamp of the postwar period.

5、Parody

piece of) writing intended to amuse by imitating the style of writing used by somebody else. Literary or musical composition imitating the characteristic style of some other work or of a writer or composer, but treating a serious subject in a nonsensical manner, as in ridicule

6、Symbolism

The term refers to the use of symbols, or to a set of related symbols; however, it is also the name given to an important movement on late 19th century and early 20th century poetry. One of the important features of Romanticism and succeeding phases of Western literature was a much more pronounced reliance upon enigmatic难以理解的, 神秘的symbolism in both poetry and prose fiction, sometimes involving obscure private codes of meaning, as in the poetry of Blake or Yeats.

A well-known early example of this is the albatross信天翁in Ancient Mariner”(1798). Many

novelists-notably Herman Melville and D. H. Lawrence-have used symbolic methods: in Melville’s Moby-Dick(1815) the White Whale (and indeed almost every object and character in the book) becomes a focus for many different suggested meanings. Melville’s extravagant symbolism was encouraged partly by the importance which American Transcendentalism gave to symbolic interpretation of the world.

William Butler Yeats often uses symbols like the winding stairs, swan, gyre, etc. in his poems.

7、Oedipus Complex 心理学用来比喻有恋母情结的人，有跟父亲作对以竞争母亲的倾向，同时又因为道德伦理的压力，而有自我毁灭以解除痛苦的倾向

A Freudian term to design to attraction on the part of the child toward the parent of the opposite sex and rivalry敌对, 竞争, 对抗and hostility toward the parent of its own. Freud introduced the concept in his Interpretation of Dreams (1899). The term derives from the Theban hero Oedipus of Greek legend, who unknowingly slew his father and married his mother; its female analogue, the Electra complex, is named for another mythological figure, who helped slay her mother.

8、Hemingway Hero

Hemingway Hero, also called code hero, is one who, wounded but strong, more sensitive, enjoys the pleasures of life(sex, alcohol, sport) in the face of ruin and death, and maintains, through some notion of a code, an ideal of himself.

9、American dream

American dream refers to the dream of material success, which assume that one best serves God and man by acquiring wealth. In The Great Gatsby, Gatsby comes from the west to the east with the dream of material success. By bootlegging and other illegal means he fulfilled his dream but ended up being killed.

10、Imagism

The doctrine and poetic practice of a small but influential group of American and British poets calling themselves imagists or imagistes between 1912 and 1917.

Imagism came into being as a reaction to the traditional English poetry to express the sense of fragmentation and dislocation混乱, 紊乱.The Imagists hold that the most effective means to express these momentary impressions is through the use of one dominant image. The image is a representation of a physical object, and the reader is made to react to it.

Imagism is characterized by the following three poetic principles:

i) to use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation;

ii) as regards rhythm, to compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in the sequence of metronome节拍器节拍器.

11、Black Humor

In contemporary literary criticism, black humor is a term applied to a large group of American novels beginning in the 1950s. Although the writers of black humor did not intentionally form a school of literary movement, there is in their novels a common core of satire which is directed against hypocrisy, materialism, racial prejudice, and above all, the dehumanization of the individual by a modern society

12/Feminism

Feminism refers to political, cultural ,and economic movements seeking greater, equal ,or among a minority ,superior rights and participation in society for women and girls. These rights and means of participation include legal protection and inclusion in politics ,business and scholarship and

recognition and building of women’s cultures and power. Its concepts overlap with those of women’s rights.

13/Anti-hero

An anti-hero/heroine appears more frequently in modern and contemporary literature. This type of characters lacks the qualities of nobility and magnanimity宽宏大量. The image of Don Quixote in Cervantes’s Don Quixote (1605) may give the readers a clear view.

14/multi-narrator