搜身美国文学 名词解释简答整理

2021年1月22日发(作者：fe2o3)
I.
名词解释

American Puritanism

Puritanism
is
the
practices
and
beliefs
of
the
Puritans.
The
Puritans
were
those
who followed the doctrine of John Calvin and wanted to purify the Church of England.
They
believe
that
human
beings
were
predestined
by
God
before
they
were
born.
Some
were
God
’
s
chosen
people
while
others
were
damned
to
hell.
No
church
or
good works could save people. The sign of being God
’
s select people was the success
in
his
work
or
the
prosperity
in
his
calling.
They
also
argued
that
everyone
should
read
Bible
in
order
to
find
God
’
s
will
and
establish
a
direct
contact
with
God.


American Puritanism also had an enduring influence on American literature.

American transcendentalism
American
transcendentalism
was
an
important
movement
in
philosophy
and
literature
that
flourished
from
1830s
to
the
Civil
War. The
transcendentalists
celebrated
the
power
of
the
human
imagination
to
commune
with
the
universe
and
transcend
the
limitations
of
the
material
world.
They
found
their
chief
source
of
inspiration
in
nature.
Emerson’s
essay
“
Nature
”

was
the
major
document
of
the
transcendental school and stated the ideas that were to remain central to it.





American Realism
Realism
refers
to
the
literary
tendency
appeared
after
the
American
Civil
War.
The
Americans began to be tired of the sentimental
feelings of
Romanticism.
A
new
generation of writers came
up with a
new attitude characterized by a
great
interest
in
realities
of
life.
It
aimed
at
the
interpretation
of
the
actualities
of
any
aspect
of
life,
free from subjective prejudice, idealism, or romantic color.

Free verse

Free
verse
is
the
rhymed
or
unrhymed
poetry
composed
without
attention
to
conventional rules of meter. The purpose was to deliver poetry from the restrictions of
formal metrical patterns and to recreate the free rhythms of natural speech. Free verse
has been characteristic of the work of
many
modern
American poets,
including
Walt
Whitman, Ezra Pound and Carl Sandburg.

Naturalism

Naturalism
is
a
critical
term
applied
to
the
method
of
literary
composition
that
aims at a detached,
subjective objectivity
in the
treatment of
natural
man. It
holds to
the philosophy of determinism, thus the
naturalists writers does
not attempt to
make
moral
judgments, outgrown the 19
th
-century scientific thought. In a word, Naturalism
developed on
the basis of realism but
went a step
further than
it
in portraying social
reality
.




1
Lost Generation

In
the
aftermath
of
World
War
I
,
many
novelists
produced
a
literature
of
disillusionment.
Some
lived
in
Europe.
They
seemed
hopelessly
provincial,
materialistic, and emotionally barren. They were known as the
“
lost generation
”
. Two
of the representative writers of the
“
lost generation
”
were Hemingway and Fitzgerald


Imagism
A
literary
movement
launched
by
British
and
American
poets
early
in
the
20th
century
that
advocated
the
use
of
free
verse,
common
speech
patterns,
and
clear
concrete
images
as
a
reaction
to
Victorian
sentimentalism.

It
was
a
movement
in
poetry
represented
by
Ezra
Pound,
Amy
Lowell,
aiming
at
clarity
of
expression
through the use of precise visual images.


Local color
When
referring
to
literature,
local
color
is
a
term
applied
to
fiction
or
verse
devoted
to
capturing
the
unique
customs,
manners,
speech,
and
other
qualities
of
a
particular regional community
, usually in humorous short stories. Local color writings
came
to
prominence
in
the
USA
in
the
late
19th
century.
The
most
famous
local
colorist
was Mark Twain; others
included Bret
Harte, Hamlin Garland, Kate Chopin,
and Sarah Orne Jewett.

II. Questions and Answers. Give brief answers to each of the following
questions
in English.

1.

What is local color
？


an
amalgam
of
romantic
plots
and
realistic
descriptions
of
things
immediately
observable: the dialects, customs, sights, and sounds of regional America”

2.
What is American Puritanism
1). Total Depravity - the concept of Original Si
2). Unconditional Election - the concept of predestination
3). Limited Atonement - Jesus died for the chosen only
, not for everyone.
4). Irresistible Grace - God's grace is freely given, it cannot be earned or denied.
5). Perseverance of the
will of God, and to live uprightly
. If anyone rejects grace after feeling its power in his
life, he will be going against the will of God.
3.
What is Imagism?

It
is a
movement of
English
and American poets
in revolt
from
Ro
manticism, which
flourish
1910-1917.
The
characteristic
products
of
the
movement
are
more
easily
recognized than its theories defined: they tend to be short , composed of short lines of
musical cadence rather than
metrical
regularity
, to avoid abstraction, and to treat
the
image with a hard, clear precision rather than with overt symbolic intent.

As
part
of
the
modernist
movement,
away
from
the
sentimentality
and
moralizing
tone of
nineteenth-century
Victorian poetry
,
imagist poets
looked to
many
sources to
help them create a
new poetic expression, aiming at clarity of expression through the
use of precise visual images.


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