文学名词解释

1. Modernism(现代主义)
1）Modernism was a complex and diverse international movement in all creative arts,
originating about the end of the 19th century.
2）rising out of skepticism and disillusionment of capitalism, which made writers and
artists search for new ways to express their understanding of the world and the human
nature. The French Symbolism, appearing in the late, 19th century, became the
forerunner of modernism.
3）It provided the greatest renaissance of the 20th century.
4）It means a departure from the conventional criteria or established values of the
Victorian age. It took the irrational philosophy and theory of psychoanalysis as its
theoretical base.
5）Major themes: the distorted, alienated and ill relationships between man and nature,
man and society, man and man, man and himself.
6) It was made up of many facets, such as symbolism, surrealism, stream of
consciousness , expressionism, futurism, etc. Alienation and loneliness are the basic
themes of modernism. Modernism also touched upon visual arts, music, dance and the
other fields of social life.
7）The major figures that were associated with this movement were Kafka, Picasso,
Pound, Eliot, Joyce and Virginia Woolf, etc.
s of consciousness (意识流)
(1)is a term to describe the flow of thoughts of the waking mind.
(2)Now it is widely used to describe the unspoken thoughts and feelings of the
characters, without resorting to objective description or conventional dialogue.
(3)It was adapted and developed by Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and others.
(4)The ability to represent the flux of a character’s thought, impressions, emotions, or
reminiscences, often without logical sequence or syntax, marked a revolution in the
form of novel at that time.
(5)The order of our study must be analytic.
(6)It begins the introspective study of the adult consciousness itself.
3. Renaissance （文艺复兴）
A. a great bourgeois cultural movement in Europe, which began in the 14th century
and continued to the mid-17th century.
B. It first started in Italy, with the flowering of painting, sculpture and literature and
then spread all over Europe.
C. the term means “rebirth” or “revival”.
D. Humanism is the essence of the renaissance.
E. representatives: Dante, Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare
F. It marked the beginning of bourgeois revolution
4. Humanism（人文主义）
is a system of beliefs upheld by writers and artists of the renaissance period in
their fighting against medieval asceticism禁欲主义.
states that man is able to find truth, goodness and beauty, and that man is in
control of the present life rather than being controlled by God.
y, humanism puts man at the center of their beliefs and takes man to be the

measure of everything
introduce new ideas, call for man’s freedom in thinking, praise man’s worldly
aspirations渴望, and denunciate （公开谴责）the feudalistic control of man’s
thought.
England, Thomas More, Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare are the
best representatives of the English humanists.
F. it is the essence of the Renaissance Period.
5. Gothic Novel(哥特式小说)
1）It is a type of romantic fiction that predominated in the late 18th century
2）Its principal elements are violence, horror, and the supernatural.
3）Mostly stories of mystery and horror took place in some haunted or dilapidated
deserted Middle Age castles.
4) gothic heroes and heroines tend to the equally mysterious, emphasis on the
irrational and dark side of human nature: the imaginative, the supernatural, the
discarded Medieval castles against the rigid rationality principle
5) They emphasize story line and setting over character and characterization.
6) Representatives: Horace Walpole– The Castle of Otranto;Ann Radcliff---- The
Mysteries of Udolpho
6. Realism（现实主义）
1）Realism is the determination to face facts and deal with them practically, without
being influenced by feelings or false ideas.
2）In literature, realism is a way of writing about people and events as they actually
are.
3）in art, an attempt to describe human behavior and surroundings or to represent
figures and objects exactly as they act or appear in life.
4） Representative writers: Daniel Defoe; Joanthan Swift; Henry Fielding, etc.
tment:The Enlightment movement
(1),it was a progressive philosophical and artistic movement which flourished in
france and swept through western Europe in the 18th century.(2)the movement was a
furtherance of the Renaissance from 14th century to the mid-17th century
.(3)its purpose
was to enlighten the whole world with the light of modern philosophical and artistic ideas.(4)they
believed that reason or rationality become standards for measurement of everything. (5)they held
the common faith in human rationality and the possibility of human perfection through education.
(6)representatives:Alexander Pope, Richard Steele,
8,Critical Realism批判现实主义
It is the main trend of the literary thoughts in the 19
th
century. It reveals the corrupting influence of
the rule of cash upon human nature. Critical realists criticize capitalist society from a democratic
viewpoint of bourgeoisie reality. The major contribution made by the 19
th
century critical realists
lies in their perfection of novels. They make use of the from of novel for full and detailed
representations of social and political events, and of the fate of individuals and of whole social
classes.