美国文学选读名词解释

1.Puritanism: 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 ,especially 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 extent it 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 .

2.The American Romanticism(浪漫主义):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.(Walt Whitman, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Edgar Allan Poe.)

II.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.

(3) 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

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.

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 over whelming presence. 自然+上帝

Ralph Waldo Emerson.

American Transcendentalism:As a philosophical and literary movement, American Transcendentalism (also known as “ American

Renaissance”) flour ished 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.

4.Naturalism: 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.

6.What is the Lost Generation?

The Lost Generation refers to the disillusioned intellectuals and artists of the years following the First World War, who rebelled against former ideals and values but could replace them only by despair of a cynical hedonism. The remark of Gertrude Stein,Hemingway

7.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, its associated purported meritocracy,and the freedoms guaranteed by the U.S. Bill of Rights

8.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 .

9.Black Humor:also called Black Comedy, writing that juxtaposes morbid or ghastly elements with comical ones.

Black humor is a type of modern humor that is caused by anger. It often describes gruesome events, which are normally associated with pleasant occasions, thus producing the congruous effect for humor. Black humor attacks on social mores through shocking language and offensive imagery. Black humor is a kind of desperate humor. It is the laughter at tragic things. In this meaningless world, according to Black

Humorists, man’s fate is decided by incomprehensive powers. We can’t do anything about it; therefore we may as well laugh. Thomas Pynchon, John Barth, and Kurt Vonnegut，Nathanael West,Joseph Heller.

10.Local colorism: as a trend became dominant in American lite rature in the 1860s and early 1870s，Local Colorism: The definit ion of local colorism is made clear by Hamlin Garland in his Cr umble Idols, he claims that it has “such quality and texture and background that it could not have been written in any other plac e or anyone else than a native.” Here “text” refers to the eleme nts which characterizes a local culture, elements such as speech, customs, and mores peculiar to one particular place. And his “ba ckground” covers physical setting and those distinctive qualities o f landscape which condition human thought and behavior. The ul timate aim of the local colorism is to create the illusion of an i ndigenous little world with qualities that differs from the world outside.

11.Code Hero硬汉形象General Features:

1.He has great physical potential and courage, 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.

13.iceberg theory:

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