美国文学-名词解释

美国文学
1. 殖民地时期及独立革命战争时期的美国文学
Philip Freneau（菲利普﹒弗瑞诺）
(1)He was considered as the “Poet of the American revolution” as the most outstanding poet in
America of the 18th century. (2)He was a satirist, a bitter polemicist. (3)He wrote many poems
encouraging revolution and encouraging the glory that would be won by overcoming the British.
The Wild Honey Suckle 《野金银花》
The Indian Burying Ground 《印第安人的殡葬地》
The British Ship《英国囚船》
The Rising Glory of America 《美洲光辉的兴起》

(1)The Wild Honey Suckle is Freneau’s best lyric (2)It anticipated the 19th—century use of simple
nature imagery.
The Indian Burying Ground anticipated romantic primitivism and the celebration of the “Noble
Savage”.

Thomas Jefferson（托马斯﹒杰弗逊）
The Declaration of Independence《独立宣言》
(1)The Declaration of Independence was adopted July 4, 1776. (2)It not only announced the birth of a
new nation, but also expounded a philosophy of human freedom. (3)It lists 13 cruelties committed by
the King of Britain. (4)The famous lines are: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that they are
endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the
pursuit of Happiness.”(5) Thomas Jefferson’s thought was inspired by the thoughts of John Locke.

浪漫主义时期的美国文学
Calvinism（加尔文主义）
(1)Calvinism refers to the religious teachings of John Calvin and his followers. (2) Calvin taught that
only certain persons, the elect, were chosen by God to be saved, and these could be saved only by
God’s grace. (3) Calvinism forms the basis for the doctrines and practices of the Huguenots, Puritans,
Presbyterians, and the Reformed churches.

American Romanticism（美国浪漫主义）
(1) American Romanticism is one of the most important periods in the history of American literature.
(2) It was a rebellion against the objectivity of rationalism. For romantics, the feelings ,intuitions and
emotions were more important than reason and common sense. They emphasized individualism,
placing the individual against the group. They affirmed the inner life of the self, and cherished strong
interest in the past, the wild, the remote, the mysterious and the strange. They stressed the element
“Americanness” in their works. (3)It started with the publication of Washington Irving’s The Sketch
Book and ended with Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. (4) Being a period of the great flowering of
American literature, it is also called “the American Renaissance.” (5) American Romanticists include
such literary figures as Washington Irving, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, William

Cullen Bryant, Henry Wordsworth Longfellow, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, Herman
Melville, Walt Whitman and some others.

Transcendentalism（超验主义）
(1) Transcendentalism refers to the religious and philosophical doctrines of Ralph Waldo Emerson and
others in New England in the middle 1800’s, which emphasized the importance of individual
inspiration and intuition, the Over—soul, and Nature. Other concepts that accompanied
Transcendentalism include the idea that nature is ennobling and the idea that the individual is divine
and, therefore, self—reliant. (2)New England Transcendentalism is the product of a combination of
native American Puritanism and European Romanticism.

Free verse（自由体诗歌）
(1)Free verse means the rhymed or unrhymed poetry composed without paying attention to
conventional rules of meter.(2) Free verse was originated by a group of French poets of the late 19
th

century. (3)Their purpose was to free themselves from the restrictions of formal metrical patterns and
to recreate instead the free rhythms of natural speech. (4)Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass is, perhaps,
the most notable example.

Symbol（象征）
(1) Symbol means an act, a person, a thing, or a spectacle that stands for something else, usually
something less palpable than the named symbol. (2) The relationship between the symbol and its
referent is not often one of simple equivalence. Allegorical symbols usually express a neater
equivalence with what they stand for than the symbols found in modern realistic fiction.

Theme（主题）
(1) Theme means the unifying point or general idea of a literary work. (2) It provides an answer to
such questions as “What is the work about”(3)Each literary work carries its own theme or themes. For
example, King Lear has many themes, among which are blindness and madness.

现实主义与自然主义时期的美国文学
American Naturalism (美国自然主义)
The American Naturalists accepted the more negative interpretation of Darwin’s evolutionary
theory and used it to account for the behavior of those characters in literary works who were
regarded as more or less complex combinations of inherited attributes, their habits conditioned by
social and economic forces.
American Naturalism is evolved from realism when the author’s tone in writing becomes less serious
and less sympathetic but more ironic and more pessimistic. It is no more than a gloomy philosophical
approach to reality, or to human existence.
Dreiser is a leading figure of his school.

Darwinism (达尔文主义)
Darwinism is a term that comes from Charles Darwin’s evolutionary theory.
Darwinist think that those who survive in the world are the fittest and those who fail to adapt
themselves to the environment will perish. They believe that man has evolved from lower forms of
life. Humans are special not because God created them in His image, but because they have
successfully adapted to changing environmental conditions and have passed on their survival-making
characteristics genetically.

Influenced by this theory, some American naturalist writers apply Darwinism as an explanation of
human nature and social reality.

Local Colorists (乡土作家)
Generally speaking, the writing of local colorists are concerned with the life of a small, well-defined
region or province. The characteristic setting is the isolated small town.
Local colorists were consciously nostalgic historian of a vanishing way of life, recorders of a present
that faded before their eyes. Yet for all their sentimentality, they dedicated themselves to minutely
accurate descriptions of the life of their regions. They worked from personal experience to record the
facts of a local environment and suggested that the native life was shaped by the curious conditions
of the locale.
Major local colorists include Hamlin Garland, Mark Twain , Kate Chopin, etc.

Theodore Dreiser (西奥多·德莱塞)
He is generally acknowledged as one of America’s literary naturalists.

Works Sister Carrie 《 嘉莉妹妹》
(1) Sister Carrie tells about a poor country girl (Carrie Meeber) who goes
to Chicago to pursue the American Dream.
(2) The novel shows Dreiser’s naturalistic view about life by illustrating
the purposelessness of life.
(3) The dominant symbol of the novel is the rocking chair that is the rocking chair that is
indicative of the uncertainty of life.
Jennie Gerhardt 《珍妮姑娘》
Trilogy of Desire 《欲望》三部曲
a. The Financier 《金融家》 b. The Titan 《巨人》 c. The Stoic 《斯多葛》
The Genius 《天才》
An American Tragedy 《美国的悲剧》
(1) An American Tragedy is Dreiser’s greatest work and the title of the
Book implies Dreiser intention to tell us that it is the social pressure
that makes Clyde’s downfall inevitable.
(2) Clyde’s tragedy is a tragedy that depends upon the American social
system which encouraged people to pursue the “dream of success ” at
all costs.

Sherwood Anderson (舍伍德·安德森)
He has been called the first of America’s “psychological writers” because he first explored the
motivations and frustrations of his fictional characters in terms of Sigmund Freud’s theories of
psychology.
He tremendously influenced such writers as Hemingway and Faulkner.

Works Winesburg, Ohio 《小镇畸人》
(1) Winesburg, Ohio is a collection of 23 interrelated stories of
samll- town life. These stories sound morbid and grotesque, but
Underneath them runs a strong desire to communicate, and love and
be loved.
(2) It won the author a foremost position in contemporary American
literary.

现代时期的美国文学
The Lost Generation (迷惘的一代)
The Lost Generation is a term first used by Gertrude Stein to describe the post-World War I
generation of American writers: men and women haunted by a sense of betrayal and emptiness
brought about by the destructiveness of the war.
Full of youthful idealism, these individuals sought the meaning of life, drank excessively, had love
affairs and created some of the finest American literature to date.
The three best-know representatives of Lost Generation are F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway
and John Dos Passos.
Others usually included among the list are Sherwood Anderson, Kay Boyle, Hart Crane, Ford Maddox
Ford and Zelda Fitzgerald.

Imagism (意象派诗歌)
Imagism came into being in Britain ans 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 regards 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.

The Beat Generation (垮掉的一代)
The members of the Beat Generation were new bohemian libertines, who engaged in a spontaneous,
sometimes messy, creativity.
The beat writers produced a body of written work controversial both for its advocacy of
non-conformity and for its non- conforming style.
The major beat writings are Jack Kerouac’s On the Road and Allen Ginsberg’s Howl. Howl became the
manifesto of the Beat Generation.

American Dream (美国梦)
American Dream refers to the dream of material success, in which one, regardless of social status,
acquires wealth and gains success by working hard and good luck.
In literature, the theme of American Dream recurs. 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. The novel tells the shattering of American Dream rather than its
success.

Expressionism (表现主义)
Expressionism refers to a movement in Germany early in the 20
th
century, in which a number of
painters sought to avoid the representation of external reality and, instead, to project a highly
personal or subjective vision of the world.

Expressionism is a reaction against realism or naturalism, aiming at presenting a post-war world
violently distorted.
Works noted for expressionism include: Eugene O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones, James Joyce’s Ulysses
and Finnegans Wake, and T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, etc..
In a further sense, the term is sometimes applied to the belief that literary works are essentially
expressions of their own authors’ moods and thoughts; this has been the dominant assumption about
literature since the rise of Romanticism.


Feminism (女权主义)
(1) Feminism incorporates both a doctrine of equal rights for women and an ideology of social
transformation aiming to create a world for women beyond simple social equality.
(2) In general, feminism is the ideology of women’s liberation based on the belief that women suffer
injustice because of their sex. Under this broad umbrella various feminists offer differing analyses of
the causes, or agents, of female oppression.
(3) Definitions of feminism by feminists tend to be shaped by their training, ideology or race. So, for
example, Marxist and Socialist feminists stress the interaction within feminism of class with gender
and focus on social distinctions between men and women. Black feminists argue much more for an
integrated analysis which can unlock the multiple systems of oppression.

Hemingway Code Hero (海明威式英雄)
Hemingway Hero, also called code hero, is one who, wounded but strong, more sensitive, enjoys the
pleasures of life (sex, alcohol, sport) in face of ruin and death, and maintains, through some notion of
a code, an ideal of himself.
Barnes in The Sun Also Rises, Henry in A Farewell to Arms and Santiago in The Old Man and the Sea
are typical of Hemingway Hero.

Harlem Renaissance (哈莱姆文艺复兴)
（1）Harlem Renaissance refers to a period of outstanding literary vigor and creativity that
occurred in the United States during the 1920s.
（2）The Harlem Renaissance changed the images of literature created by many black and
white American writers. New black images were no longer obedient and docile, instead they showed a
new confidence and racial pride.
(3) The leading figures are Langston Hughs, James Weldon Johnson, Wallace Thurman, etc..

Impressionism (印象主义)
Impressionism is a style of painting that gives the impression made by the subject on the artist
without much attention to details. Writers accepted the same conviction that the personal attitudes
and moods of the writer were legitimate elements in depicting character or setting or action.
Briefly, it is a style of literature characterized by the creation of general impressions and moods rather
than realistic moods.
现代时期的美国文学

Ezra Pound
(1) He was identified as the father of modern American poetry and the most influential leader of the
Imagist Movement.
(2) He had an enormous influence on the modernist writers in Britain and America after WWII.

Works The Cantos 《诗章》
In a Station of the Metro 《在地铁站里》
(1) In a Station of the Metro serves as a typical example of the Imagist ideas.
(2) The one-image poem is an observation of the poet of the human faces seen in a Paris
subway station.
(3) “Apparition” suggests a visible appearance of something not present, and especially
of a dead person. Here the faces of people in the subway station are compared to petals on a wet,
black bough.

A Pact 《盟约》
(1) A Pact is a poem in which Pound started to find some agreement between
“Whitmanesque” free verse, which he had attacked for its carelessness in composition.
(2) In the poem “broke the new wood” means that Whitman made experiments with the
conventions of traditional poetry. “commerce” means the exchange of views or attitudes. The poem
indicates that Pound would like to learn from the free verse and show respect to Whitman.