卢卡诺美国文学名词解释

2021年1月19日发(作者：olivetti)
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
（资本主义）
, its associated
purported
meritocracy,
（知识界精华）
and
the
freedoms
guaranteed
by
the
U.S.
Bill
of Rights.

American Puritanism
清教主义
: Puritanism is the practices and beliefs of the
puritans. The Puritans were originally members of a division of the protestant
church who wanted to purify their religious beliefs and practices. They accepted
the doctrines of predestination, original sin and total depravity, and limited
atonement
through
a
special
infusion
of
grace
from
God.
American
literature
in
the
17
th
century mostly consisted of Puritan literature. Puritanism had an enduring
influence on American literature. It had become, to some extent, so much a state
of
mind,
so
much
a
part
of
national
cultural
atmosphere,
rather
than
a
set
of
tenets.

Transcendentalism
超
验
主
义
:
Transcendentalism
was
a
group
of
new
ideas
in
literature, religion, culture and philosophy that emerged in New England in the
early to middle 19
century. Transcendentalists spoke for cultural rejuvenation
and against the materialism of American society. It placed emphasis on spirit, or
the
Over
soul,
as
the
most
important
thing
in
the
world.
It
stressed
the
importance
of individual and offered a fresh perception nature ad symbolic of the spirit of
God. Prominent transcendentalists included Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David
Thorough.

American Naturalism
自然主义
: American naturalism was a new and harsher realism.
The naturalists attempt to achieve extreme objectivity and frankness, presenting
characters of low social and economic classes who were determined by environment
and heredity. It emphasized that the world was amoral, the men and women had no
free
will,
that
lives
were
controlled
by
heredity
and
environment,
that
the
destiny
of
humanity
was
misery
in
life
and
oblivion
in
death.
The
pessimism
and
deterministic ideas naturalism pervaded the works of such American writers as
Stephen Crane and Theodore Dreiser.

th
American
Naturalism(
美国自然主义文学
)
：
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.2)
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.3>Dreiser is a leading figure of his school.

The Gilded Age
镀金时代
:
the Gilded Age refers to the era of rapid economic and
population
growth
in
the
United
States
during
the
post-Civil
War
and
post-Reconstruction
eras
of
the
late
19th
century.
The
term

Age
was
coined
by Mark Twain
and Charles Dudley
Warner
in their 1873
book,
The Gilded Age: A Tale
of Today
.The Gilded Age is most famous for the creation of a modern industrial
economy. The end of the Gilded Age coincided with the
Panic of 1893, a deep
depression.
The
depression
lasted
until
1897
and
marked
a
major
political
realignment in the election of 1896. After that came the Progressive Era.

The
Lost
Generation
:
The
Lost
Generation
is
a
group
of
expatriate
American
writers
residing primarily in Paris during the 1920s and 1930s. The group was given its
name
by
the
American
writer
Gertrude
Stein,
who
used
“a
lost
generation”
to
refer
to
expatriate
Americans
bitter
about
their
World
War
I
experiences
and
disillusioned
with
American
society.
Hemingway
later
used
the
phrase
as
an
epigraph
for
his
novel
The
Sun
Also
Rises.
It
consisted
of
many
influential
American
writers,
including
Ernest
Hemingway,
F.
Scott
Fitzgerald,
William
Carlos
Williams
and
Archibald MacLeish.

The
Lost
Generation(
迷惘的一代）
：
The
lost
generation
is
a
term
first
used
by
Stein
to describe the post-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.2>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.3>the three best-known representatives of lost generation are
Fitzgerald, Hemingway and John dos Passos.

Tragedy
: in general, a literary work in which the protagonist meets an unhappy or
disastrous end. Unlike
comedy, tragedy depicts
the actions of a central
character
who is usually dignified or heroic. Through a series of events, this tragic hero
is brought to a fi
nal downfall. The causes of the tragic hero’s downfall vary.
In traditional dramas, the cause can be fate, a flaw in character or an error in
judgment.
In
modern
dramas,
where
the
tragic
hero
is
often
an
ordinary
individual,
the causes range from moral or psychological weakness to the evils of society.

Catch-22
第
22
条军规
:
Catch-22 is a general critique of bureaucratic operation and
reasoning. Resulting from its specific use in the book, the phrase
common
idiomatic
usage
meaning

no-win
situation
or

double
bind
of
any
type.
The term was originally from Joseph Heller’s anti novel
Catch-22.

Beat Generation
垮掉的一代
:
group of American writers of the 1950s whose writing
expressed
profound
dissatisfaction
with
contemporary
American
society
and
endorsed
an alternative set of values. The term sometimes is used to refer to those who
embraced
the
ideas
of
these
writers.
The
Beat
Generation's
best-known
figures
were
writers Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac.

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.2>
The
Beat
writers
produced
a
body
of
written
work
controversial
both
for
its
advocacy
of non-conformity and for its non-conforming style.3> the major beat writings are
Allen Ginsberg’s became the manifesto of The Beat Generation.

Psychological
Realism
心理现实主义
:
it
is
the
realistic
writing
that
probes
deeply
into
the
complexities
of
characte
rs’
thoughts
and
motivations.
It
places
more
than
the usual amount of emphasis on interior characterization and on the motives, and
internal
action
which
springs
from
and
develops
external
action.
In
Psychological
Realism, character and characterization are more than usually important. Henry
James is considered a great master of psychological realism.

Free Verse
自由诗体
: free verse 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. While it alternates stressed and unstressed
syllables as stricter verse form do, free verse dose so in a looser way. Walt
Whitman’s poetry is an example of free verse.

Confessional
Poetry
自白诗
:

it
is
a
type
of
modern
poetry
in
which
poets
speak
with
openness and frankness about their own lives, such as in poems about illness,
sexuality and despondence. Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath and Allen Ginsberg and
Theodore Roethke are the most important American poets.

Imagism
意象派
: The 1920s saw a vigorous literary activity in America. In poetry
there
appeared
a
strong
reaction
against
Victorian
poetry.
Imagists
placed
primary
reliance on the use of precise, sharp images as a means of poetic expression and
stressed
precision
in
the
choice
of
words,
freedom
in
the
choice
of
subject
matter
and form, and the use of colloquial language. Most of the imagist poets wrote in
free verse, using such devices as assonance and alliteration rather than formal
metrical schemes to give structure to their movement which had these
as
its
aims
is
known
in
literary
history
as
Imagism.
Its
prime
mover
was
Ezra
Pound.

Imagism(
意象主义
)
：
Imagism came into being in Britain and U.S around 1910 as a
reaction to the traditional English poetry to express the sense of fragmentation
and
dislocation.2>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.3>imagism
is
characterized
by
the
following
three
poetic
principles: treatment of subject matter;y of expression;C. as
regards
rhythm
,to
compose
in
the
sequence
of
the
musical
phrase,
not
in
the
sequence
of metronome. 4> pound’s In a Station of the Metro is a well
-known inagist poem.

Black Humor
: the use of morbid and the absurd for darkly comic purposes in modern
fiction and drama. The term refers as much to the tone of anger and bitterness as
it does to the grotesque and morbid situations, which often deal with suffering,
anxiety,
and
death.
Black
humor
is
a
substantial
element
in
the
Anti-novel
and
the
Theatre of Absurd. Joseph Heller's
Catch-22
is an almost archetypal example.

Irony
:
a
contrast
or
an
incongruity
between
what
is
stated
and
what
is
really
meant,
or between what is expected to happen and what actually happens in drama and
literature. There are types of irony: verbal irony, dramatic irony and irony of
situation. Irony of situation typically takes the form of a discrepancy between
appearance and reality, or between what a character expects and what actually
happens. Both verbal and irony of situation share the suggestion of a concealed
truth conflicting with surface appearances.

Allusion:
A reference to a person, a place, an event, or a literary work that a
writer expects the reader to recognize and respond to. An allusion may be drawn
from history, geography, literature, or religion.

Satire
讽刺
:
A
kind
of
writing
that
holds
up
to
ridicule
or
contempt
the
weaknesses
and
wrongdoings
of
individuals,
groups,
institutions,
or
humanity
in
general.
The
aim
of
satirists
is
to
set
a
moral
standard
for
society,
and
they
attempt
to
persuade
the reader to see their point of view through the force of laughter.

Symbol
: A symbol is a sign which suggests more than its literal meaning. In other
words,
a
symbol
is
both
literal
and
figurative.
A
symbol
is
a
way
of
telling
a
story
and a way of conveying meaning. The best symbols are those that are believable in
the lives of the characters and also convincing as they convey a meaning beyond
the literal level of the story. If the symbol is obscure or ambiguous, then the
very obscurity and the ambiguity may also be part of the meaning of the story.

Symbolism
: Symbo
lism is the writing technique of using symbols. It’s a literary
movement
that
arose
in
France
in
the
last
half
of
the
19th
century
and
that
greatly
influenced many English writers, particularly poets, of the 20th century. It
enables poets to compress a very complex idea or set of ideas into one image or
even
one
word.
It’s
one
of
the
most
powerful
devices
that
poets
employ
in
creation.

Stream
of
consciousness(
意识流
)
(or
interior
monologue);In
literary
criticism,
Stream
of
consciousness
denotes
a
literary
technique
which
seeks
to
describe
an
individual’s
point of view by giving the written
equivalent of
the
character’s thought
processes.
Stream of consciousness writing is strongly associated with the modernist movement.
Its introduction in the literary context, transferred from psychology, is attributed
to
May
Sinclair.
Stream
of
consciousness
writing
is
usually
regarded
as
a
special
form
of
interior
monologue
and
is
characterized
by
associative
leaps
in
syntax
and
punctuation
that
can
make
the
prose
difficult
to
follow,tracing
as
they
do
a
character’s fragmentary thoughts and sensory writers to employ this
technique in the english language include James Joyce and William Faulkner.

American
realism
：
（美国现实主义）
Realism
was
a
reaction
against
Romanticism
and
paved
the way to Modernism; 2).During this period a new
generation
of writers,
dissatisfied
with the Romantic ideas in the older generation, came up with a new inspiration. This
new attitude was characterized by a great interest in the realities of life. It aimed
at the interpretation of the realities of any aspect of life, free from subjective
prejudice,
idealism,
or
romantic
color.
Instead
of
thinking
about
the
mysteries
of
life
and
death
and
heroic
individualism,
people’s
attention
was
now
dir
ected
to
the
interesting features of everyday existence, to what was brutal or sordid, and to the
open
portayal
of
class
struggle;3)
so
writers
began
to
describe
the
integrity
of
human
characters reacting under various circumstances and picture the pioneers of the far
west,
the
new
immigrants
and
the
struggles
of
the
working
class;
4)
Mark
Twain
Howells
and Henry James are three leading figures of the American Realism.


Local Colorism(
乡土文学
)
：
Generally speaking, the writings of local colorists are
concerned
with
the
life
of
a
small,
well-defined
region
or
province.
The
characteristic
setting is the isolated small town. 2) Local colorists were consciously nostalgic
historians 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 local. 3) major local colorists is Mark Twain.

A
J
azz age(
爵士时代
)
:The Jazz Age describes the period of the 1920s and 1930s, the
years between world war I and world war II. Particularly in north America. With the
rise
of
the
great
depression,
the
values
of
this
age
saw
much
decline.
Perhaps
the
most
representative literary work of the age is American writer Fitzgerald’s The Great
Gatsby. Highlighting what some describe as the decadence and hedonism, as well as the
growth of individualism.
Fitzgerald is largely credited with coining the term” Jazz
Age”.

Feminism(
女权主义
)
: Feminisim 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>i
n
general,
feminism
is
ideology
of
women’s
liberation
based
on
the
belief that women suffer injustice because of their sex. Under this broad umbrella
various
feminisms
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
Code
Hero
,also
called
code
hero,
is
one
who, wounded but strong more sentitive, 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.2> 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 Code Hero

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.2>briefly, it is a style of
literature
characterized
by
the
creation
of
general
impressions
and
moods
rather
that
realistic mood.


Modernism(
现代主义
)
：
Modernism
is
comprehensive
but
vague
term
for
a movement
,
which
begin
in
the
late
19th
century
and
which
has
had
a
wide
influence
internationally
during
much of the 20th century.2> modernism takes the irrational philosophy and the theory
of psycho-analysis as its theoretical case.3> the term pertains to all the creative
arts.
Especially
poetry,
fiction,
drama,
painting,music
and
architecture.4>
in
england
from
early
in
the
20th
century
and
during
the
1920s
and
1930s,
in
America
from
shortly
before the first world war and on during the inter-war period, modernist tendencies
were at their most active and fruitful.5>as far as
literature
is concerned,
Modernism
reveals
a
breaking
away
from
established
rules,
traditions
and

ways
of
looking
at
man’s
position
and
function
in
the
universe
and
many
experiments
i
n
form
and

is
particularly
concerned
with
language
and
how
to
use
it
and
with
writing
itself.

the
gilded age
: Plains Indians were pushed in a series of Indian wars onto restricted
period also witnessed the creation of a modern industrial economy.
A
national
transportation
and
communication
network
was
created,
the
corporation
became
the dominant form of business organization, and a managerial revolution transformed
business operations. By the beginning
of
the twentieth century, per
capita income
and
industrial production in the United States exceeded that of any other country except
Britain. Long hours and hazardous working conditions, led many workers to attempt to
form
labor
unions
despite
strong
opposition
from
industrialists
and
the

era
of
intense
political
partisanship,
the
Gilded
Age
was
also
an
era
of
reform. The
Civil
Service Act sought to curb government corruption by requiring applicants for certain
governmental jobs to take a competitive examination. The Interstate Commerce Act
sought to end discrimination by railroads against small shippers and the Sherman
Antitrust Act outlawed business monopolies. These years also saw the rise of the
Populist
crusade.
Burdened
by
heavy
debts
and
falling
farm
prices,
many
farmers
joined
the
Populist
party,
which
called
for
an
increase
in
the
amount
of
money
in
circulation,
government
assistance
to
help
farmers
repay
loans,
tariff
reductions,
and
a
graduated
income Twain called the late nineteenth century the
he meant that the period was glittering on the surface but corrupt underneath. In the
popular
view,
the
late
nineteenth
century
was
a
period
of
greed
and
guile:
of
rapacious
Robber Barons, unscrupulous speculators, and corporate buccaneers, of shady business