美国文学术语解释(全面且简练)

2021年1月14日发(作者：石璞)
术语解释（美国文学简史）
1、American Puritanism
Back grounding:
American Puritanism appeared in the colonial period, from 1607
to 1775, in America.
Representatives:
There are many writers in this period, such as Captain John
Smith, the author of the
True Relation of Virginia (1608) and
Description of New England (1616),
Anne Bradstreet, who wrote
the famous work called Tenth Muse Lately Sprung up in America
(1650).
Main ideas:
They stress predestination, original sin, total depravity, and
limited atonement from God’s grace. They go to America to prove
that they are God’s chosen people who will enjoy God’s
blessings on earth and in Heaven. Finally, they build a way of
life that stresses hard work, thrift, piety, and sobriety.
Influences:
American Literature is based on a myth ------ the Biblical myth
of the Garden of Eden. The American Puritan’s metaphorical
made of perception ---- symbolism. It has a great influence not
only on the Literary Scene in Colonial America, , but also on
the literature in the 18th century, especially on Jonathan
Edwards and Benjamin Franklin.
American Romanticism
Back grounding:

It appeared in the end of the 18
th
century through the outbreak
of the Civil War, from 1828 to 1865, and it was strongly
influenced by European culture.
Representative:

There are some representative new England poets and out-sanding
writers such as, James Fenimaore Cooper, the author of
The
Leather Stocking Tales,
Washington Irving , whose famous work
is
The Sketch Book (1819)
.

Main ideas:
Romanticism is a rebellion against the objectivity of
rationalism. .For romantics, the feelings, intuitions and
emotions are more important than reason and common sense. They
emphasize individualism, placing the individual against the
group, against authority.
Influence:
It produces a feeling of “Newness” which inspires the romantic
imagination.
3、Transcendentalisms
Back grounding:
Transcendtalism flourished in the New England from about 1836
to 1860.
Ralph Waldo Emerson published ‘Nature’ in 1836 which
represented a new way of intellectual thinking in America.
Representatives:
There are two representative writers, namely Ralph Waldo
Emerson (1803----1882), whose famous work called
Nature
, Henry
David Thoreau (1817----1862), the author of
Walden..

Main ideas:
Believe people can learn things both from the outside world by
means of the 5 senses and from the inner world by intuition;
It places spirit first and matter second; It takes nature as
symbolic of spirit or God. It emphasizes the significance of
the individual; Religion is an emotional communication between
an individual soul and the universal ‘over soul’.
Influences:
It is a manifestation of Romantic Movement in literature and
philosophy and an ethical guide to life of America. However,
it is never a systematic philosophy because of a lack of logical
connection.
4、Realism
Back grounding:
In American literature, the Civil War brought the Romantic
Period to an end. The Age of Realism came into existence, from
1865 to 1918.
Representatives:
There are some famous writers in this period, such as William
Dean Howells , the Dean of American Realism, whose famous work
is A Chance Acquaintance 《偶然相遇》; O. Henry, the author of
After Twenty Years;
Henry James, the author of
The Portrait of
a Lady.
Main ideas:
Realism is the theory of writing in which familiar aspects of
contemporary life and everyday scenes are represented in a
straightforward or mother-of-fact manner. It often uses the
open ending, focuses on the lives of the common people, and
emphasizes objectivity.
Influences:
It comes as a reaction against the lie of romanticism and
sentimentalism. 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.
5、Local Colorism
Back grounding：
Local colorism as a trend became dominant in American
literature in the late 1860s and early 1870s；The frontier
humorists who had been popular with their “tall tales” before
the Civil War paved the way for local color fiction.
Representatives：
There is a famous writers in this period, namely Mark Twain,(马
克?吐温), whose masterpiece is
Huckleberry Finn.

Main ideas:
Local color fiction presents a locale which is distinguished
from the outside world, and describes the exotic and the
picturesque. It describes things that are not common in other
regions, attempting to show things as they as they are.
Local color fiction glorifies the past and stresses the
influence of setting on character.
Influences:
Mark Twain is the representative in this period, and his style
is the vernacular language, local color, and cracker-barrel
philosopher.
6、Naturism
Back grounding：
Naturalism is a literary trend prevailing in Europe, especially
in France and Germany, in the second half of the 19th century.
And, Charles Darwin stresses the struggle of existence,
survival of the fittest, natural selection.
Representatives:
There are some writers in this period, such as Stephen Crane,
Frank Norris, and Jack London
.
Crane’s
Maggie: A Girl of the
Streets
is the first American naturalism work. Main ideas:
Humans are controlled by laws of heredity and environment.
The universe is cold, godless, indifferent and hostile to human
desires.
Influences:
Although naturalist literature describes the world with
sometimes brutal realism, it sometimes also aims at bettering
the world through social reform. This combination of grim
reality and desire for improvements is typical of America as
it moves into the twentieth century.
7、Imagism
Back grounding:
Imagism is a literary movement launched by a number of British
and American poets from 1909 to 1917, which is prevalent in the
Western world and is a branch of the Symbolist literary
movement.
Representatives:
Four Quartets
; Wallace Stevens; Robert Frost.
Main ideas:
In a sense, imagism is equivalent to naturalism in fiction. It
produces free verse without imposing a rhythmical pattern.
Imagism tries to record objective observations of an object or
a situation without interpretation or comment by the poet.
Influences:
It is one of the most essential techniques of writing poetry
in modern period, with a spirit of revolt against conventions;
imagism is anti- romantic and anti –Victorian.
8、the Lost Generation
Back grounding:
The term “lost generation” is coined by Gertrude Stein, a lost
generation writer herself, after World War I. It is between the
first and second World Wars.
Representatives:
There are some excellent writers, including Ernest Hemingway;
whose famous work is
The Old Man and the Sea (1952);
Scott
Fitzgerald, the author of
the Great Gatsby.

Main ideas:
The Lost Generation is a term used to describe a group of
American writers who were rebelling against what America had
become by the 1900’s.
It aims to seek the bohemian lifestyle and reject the values
of American materialism and means this generation had lost the
beautiful sense of the calm idyllic past.
Influences:
Being cut off from their past, disillusioned in reality, and
without a meaningful future to fall on, they are lost in
disillusionment and existential voids.
9、the code hero（网上找的）
The Hemingway hero is an average man of decidedly masculine
tastes, sensitive and intelligent, a man of action, and one of
few words. That is an individualist keeping emotions under
control, stoic and self-disciplined in a dreadful place. These
people are usually spiritual strong, people of certain skills,
and most of them encounter death many times. The heroes in his
book are all have something in common which Hemingway values:
they have seen the cold world and for one cause or another, they
boldly and courageously face the reality; whatever the result
is, they are ready to live with grace under pressure. The
Hemingway code hero has an indestructible spirit for his
optimistic view of life; though he is pessimistic that is
Hemingway.
10、Iceberg Theory(网上找的)
It is a term used to describe the writing style of American
writer Ernest
Hemingway. The meaning of a piece is not immediately evident,
because the crux of the story lies below the surface, just as
most of the mass of a real iceberg similarly lies beneath the
surface.
11、the Jazz Age
The 20’s are also referred to as “The Jazz Age,” a term coined
by F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Jazz Age began with the end of WWI, at a time when, for the
first time, the U.S. had emerged as a world power and ended with
the stock market crash of 1929.
The most representative literary work is American writer F.
Scott Fitzgerald’s
the great Gatsby.
This decade saw changes in lifestyle and technology that
revolutionized American life in such a way that it has never
been the same since.
12、Free verse:

Free verse is poetry that has an irregular rhythm and line
length, and that attempts avoid any predetermined verse
structure. While it alternates stressed and unstressed
syllables as stricter verse forms do, free verse does so in a
looser way. Whiteman’s poetry is an example of free verse at
its most impressive, for example Song of Myself. It has since
been used Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot and other major American poets
of the 20
th
century. Walt Whiteman’s Leaves of Grass is,
perhaps , the most notable example.