2021年1月23日发(作者：sucralose)
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American Naturalism
（自然主义）

American
naturalism
was
a
new
and
harsher
realism,
and
like
realism,
it
had
come
from
Europe.
Naturalism
was
an
outgrowth
of
Realism
that
responded
to
theories
in
science,
psychology, human behavior and social thought current in the late nineteenth century. In the last
decade of the nineteenth century, with the development of industry and modern science, intelligent
minds
began
to
see
that
man
was
no
longer
a
free
ethical
being
in
a
cold,
indifferent
and
essentially
Godless
universe.
In
this
chance
world
he
was
both
helpless
and
hopless.
European
writers like Emile Zola had already developed this acute social consciousness. They saw man
’
s
life as governed by the two forces of heredity and environment, forces absolutely beyond man
’
s
control.
American
naturalism
had
been
shaped
by
the
war,
by
the
social
upheavals
that
undermined the comforting faith of an earlier age, and by the disturbing teachings of Darwinism.

America
’
s
literary
naturalists
dismissed
the
validity
of
comforting
moral
truths.
They
attempted
to achieve extreme objectivity and frankness, presenting characters of low social and
economic classes who were determined by their environment and heredity. In presenting extremes
of life, the naturalists sometimes displayed an affinity to the sensationalism of early romanticism,
but unlike their romantic predecessors, the naturalists emphasized that the world was amoral, that
men and women had no free will, that lives were controled by heredity and environment, that the
destiny
of
humanity
was
misery
in
life
and
oblivion
in
death.
The
pessimism
and
deterministic
ideas
of
naturalism
pervaded
the
works
of
such
American
writers
as
Stephen
Crane,
Benjamin
Frank Norris, Jack London and Theodore Dreiser.


Era of Modernism
（现代主义）

The years from 1910 to 1930 are often called the Era of Modernism, for there seems to have
been in both Europe and America a strong awareness of some sort of
“
break
”

with the past.
Movements in all the arts overlapped and succeeded one another with
amazing speed. The new
artists
shared
a
desire
to
capture
the
complexity
of
modern
life,
to
focus
on
the
variety
and
confusion of the twentieth century by reshaping and sometimes discarding the ideas and habits of
the nineteenth century. The Era of Modernism was indeed the era of the New.

Lost Generation
（迷惘的一代）

This
terms
has
been
used
again
and
again
to
describe
the
people
of
the postwar
years.
It
describes
the
Americans
who
remained
in
Paris
as
a
colony
of
“
expatriates
”

or
exiles.
It
describes the writers like Hemingway who lived in semi-poverty. It describes the Americans who
returned to their native land with an intense awareness of living in an unfamiliar changing world.
After World War I, the young disappointed American writers, such as Hemingway, Pound,
Cummings, F. Scott Fitzgerald, chose Paris as their place of exile. They came from the East or the
Middle
West
of
the
U.S.A,
and
most
of
them
had
been
shocked
or
wounded
in
the
war.
An
American
woman
writer
named
Gertrude
Stein,
who
had
lived
in
Paris
since
1903,
welcomed
these
young
writers
to
her
apartment
which
was
already
famous
as
a
literary
salon.
She
called
them
“
the Lost Generation
”
, because they had cut themselves off from their past in America in
order to create new types of writing which had never been tried before.
“
The Lost Generation
”

is
also
painted
in
the
writers
’

writings.
The
young
English
and
American
expatriates,
men
and
women, were caught in the war and cut off from the old values and yet unable to come to terms
with
the
new
era
when
civilization
had
gone
mad.
They
wandered
pointlessly
and
restlessly,
;.
..
enjoying things like fishing, swimming, bullfight and beauties of nature, but they were aware all
the
while
that
the
world
is
crazy
and
meaningless
and
futile.
Their
whole
life
is
undercut
and
defeated.

Jazz Age
To many, World War I was a tragic failure of old values, of old politics, of old ideas. The
social
mood
was
often
one
of
confusion
and
despair.
Yet,
on
the
surface
the
mood
in
America
during the 1920s did not seem desperate. Instead, Americans entered a decade of prosperity and
exhibitionism that prohibition, the legal ban against alcoholic beverages, did more to encourage
than
to
curb.
Fashions
were
extravagant;
more
and
more
automobiles
crowded
the
roads,
advertising flourished; and nearly every American home had a radio in it.

Fads swept the nation. People danced the Charleston, and they sat upon the flagpoles. This
was
the
Jazz
Age,
when
New
Orleans
musicians
moved
“
up
the
river
”

to
Chicago,
and
the
theatre of New York
’
s Harlem pulsed with the music that had become a symbol
of the times.
These were the Roaring Twenties. The roaring of the decade served to mask a quiet pain, the sense
of loss that Gertrude Stein had observed in Paris. F. Scott Fitzgerald portrays the Jazz Age as a
generation of
“
the beautiful and demand
”
, drowning in their pleasures.

Stream of consciousness
（意识流）

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 a character's fragmentary thoughts and
sensory feelings.

Stream of consciousness and interior monologue are distinguished from dramatic
monologue, where the speaker is addressing an audience or a third person, and is used
chiefly
in
poetry
or
drama.
In
stream
of
consciousness,
the
speaker's
thought
processes are more often depicted as overheard in the mind (or addressed to oneself)
and is primarily a fictional device.
Stream
of
consciousness
is
characterized
by
a
flow
of
thoughts
and
images,
which may not always appear to have a coherent structure or cohesion. The plot line
may weave in and out of time and place, carrying the reader through the life span of a
character
or
further
along
a
timeline
to
incorporate
the
lives
(and
thoughts)
of
characters from other time periods.)

Stream
of
Consciousness
or
interior
monologue
is
one
of
the
modern
literary
technique.
It
was
first
used
in
1922
by
the
Irish
novelist
James
Joyce.
This
modernistic
trend
in
1920s,
deeply
influenced
by
the
psycho-analytic
theories
of
Sigmund Freud, adopted the psycho-analytic approach in literary creation to explore
the
existence
of
sub-conscious
and
unconscious
elements
in
the
mind.
In
English
fiction, the novels of stream-of consciousness were represented by James Joyce and
Virginian
Woolf.
Those
novels
broke
through
the
bounds
of
time
and
space,
and
depicted vividly and skillfully the unconsciou activity of the mind fast changing and
flowing
incessantly,
particularly
the
hesitant,
misted,
distracted
and
illusory
psychology people had when they faced reality. Britain was the centre of the novels of
stream-of consciousness
;.
..
The
modern
American
writer
William
Faulkner
successfully
advanced
this
technique. In his stories, action and plots were less important than the reactions and
inner musings of the narrators. Time sequences were often dislocated. The reader feels
himself
to
be
a
participant
in
the
stories,
rather
than
an
observer.
A
high
degree
of
emotion
can
be
achieved
by
this
technique.
But
it
also
makes
the
stories
hard
to
understand.

American Realism
（现实主义时期

1865-1918
）

The Background of American Realism
The fifty years between the end of the Civil War to the outbreak of the First World War
Changes in every aspect of American life
Industrialization and the urbanization,
“
The Gilded Age
”

Tired of sentimental feelings of Romanticism
Interest in reality of life

In American literature, the Civil War brought the Romantic Period to an end. The Age of
Realism
came
into
existence.
It
came
as
a
reaction
against
the
lie
of
romanticism
and
sentimentalism, as Everett Carter put it. Realism turned from an emphasis on the strange toward a
faithful rendering of the ordinary, a slice of life as it is really lived. It expresses the concern for
common
place
and
the
low,
and
it
offers
an
objective
rather
than
an
idealistic
view
of
human
nature
and
human
experience.
Realist
literature
finds
the
drama
and
the
tension
beneath
the
ordinary surface of life. A realist writer is more objective than subjective, more descriptive than
symbolic. Realists looked for truth in everyday truths. A fearless and enthusiastic champion of the
new school was William Dean Howells, who by virtue of his powerful critical writings and of his
generous
patronage
as
senior
editor
of
the
influential
journal
Atlantic
Monthly,
made
for
the
triumph of realism over romanticism and thus remained
For
over
three
decades
the
“
defacto
”

dean
of
American
literature.
Two
other
staunch
fighters for realism were Mark Twain and Henry James. Beginning as a local colorist, Mark Twain
wrote
works
which
have
become
part
of
the
American
cultural
tradtion.
Henry
James,
with
his
“
international
theme
”
,
and
his
psychological
realism,
is
now
considered
as
one
of
the
most
important literary figures coming out of the nineteenth-century.

Free Verse
（自由体诗）

Poetry that lacks a regular meter, does not rhyme, and uses irregular (and sometimes very
short)
line
lengths.
Writers
of
free
verse
disregard
traditional
poetic
conventions
of
rhyme
and
meter, relying instead on parallelism, repetion, and the ordinary cadences and stresses of everyday
discourse.
In
English,
notable
use
of
free
verse
dates
back
to
the
King
James
translation
of
the
biblical Psalms and Song of Solomon, but it was not really recognized as an important new form
until Walt Whitman
’
s Leaves of Grass (1855). Since World War I, nonrhyming and nonmetrical
forms of verse have been used by most poets.
Although
free
verse
had
been
used
before
Whitman ---notably
in
Italian
opera
and
in
the
King
James
translation
of
the
Bible
—
it
was
Whitman
who
pioneered
the
form
and
made
it
acceptable in American poetry. It has since been used by Ezra Pound. T.S. Eliot, William Carlos
Williams, Wallace Stevens, and other major American poets of the twentieth century.
;.