美国文学史名词解释

1. Puritanism

It were flourishing from the beginning of 17th to the middle period of 18th. They stressed predestination, original sin, total depravity, and limited atonement from God?s grace. They went to America to prove that they were God?s chosen people w ho would enjoy God?s blessings on earth and in Heaven. Finally, they built a way of life that stressed hard work, thrift, piety, and sobriety. Both doctrinaire and an opportunist.

Its Influence on literary were as follows:（影响）(1) American Literature is based on a myth ------ the Biblical myth of the Garden of Eden. (2)The American Puritan?s metaphorical made of perception ---- symbolism. The representatives were Edwards(The Freedom of the Will), Franklin(On the Art of Self-improvement), Crevecoeur(Letters from an American Farmer).

代表作家及代表作：Captain John Smith True Relation of Virginia (1608)

Anne Bradstreet “To My Dear and Loving Husband”

Benjamin Franklin: The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin

2. American Romanticism

Romanticism was a complex artistic, literary and intellectual movement that originated in the second half of the 18th century in Europe, and gained strength in reaction to the Industrial Revolution.

Elements of Romanticism

1. Frontier: vast expanse, freedom, no geographic limitations.

2. Optimism: greater than in Europe because of the presence of frontier.

不要这么多，我就删掉了3、4、5条。。。

Romantic Attitude

1. Appeals to imagination; use of the “willing suspension of disbelief.”

2. Stress on emotion rather than reason; optimism, geniality.

3. Subjectivity: in form and meaning.

Characteristics of Romanticism:

a.Romanticism was a rebellion against the objectivity of rationalism. (subjectivity)

b.For romantics, the feelings, intuitions and emotions were more important than reason and common sense.

c.They emphasized individualism, placing the individual against the group, against authority.

d.The affirmed the inner life of the self, and wanted to be free to develop and express his own inner thoughts.

e.Typical literary forms of romanticism include ballad, lyric, sentimental comedy, problem novel, historical novel ,

gothic romance, metrical romance, sonnet.

Representatives:

?New England Poets: William Cullen Bryant; Henry Wadsworth Longfellow;

?Writers: James Fenimaore Cooper, Washington Irving“The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Grayon”

?浪漫主义的影响：The romantic exaltation of the individual suited the nation?s revolutionary heritage and its frontier egalitarianism.

3 New England Transcendentalism

As a philosophical and literary movement, transcendentalism flourished in New England from 1830s to the Civil War. Its doctrines found their greatest literary advocates in Emerson who published …Nature? in 1836 which represented a new way of intellectual thinking in America and presented…The Universe is composed of Nature and the Soul, Spirit is present everywhere. ? and romantic idealism on Puritan soil as well as Thoreau. Emerson?s Nature has been called the “Manifesto of American Transcendentalism”. As a philosophy, transcendentalism was neither logical nor systematical. It exalted feeling over reason, individual expression over the restraints of law and custom.Yet transcendentalism was a powerful expression of the intellectual mood of the age.

What is Transcendentalism?

In the realm of art and literature it meant the shattering of pseudo-classic rules and forms in favor of a spirit of freedom, the creation of works filled with the new passion for nature and common humanity and incarnating a fresh sense of the wonder, promise, and romance of life.

Major Concepts (main ideas)

1, …transcend ere?: to rise above, to pass beyond the limits

2, Believe people could learn things both from the outside world by means of the 5 senses and from the inner world by intuition.

3, It placed spirit first and matter second

4, It took nature as symbolic of spirit or God.

5, It emphasized the significance of the individual

6, Religion was an emotional communication betwee n an individual soul and the universal …oversoul?.

Major writers and Literary Works

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803----1882) Self-Reliance

Henry David Thoreau (1817----1862) Walden

超验主义的影响：it could exercise a healthy and restorative influence on the human mind.The natural implication that things in nature tended to become symbolic, and the physical world was a symbol of the spiritual. This in turn added to the

tradition of literary symbolism in American literature.the ideas it represented have remained a strong influence on great American writers from the days of Hawthorne and Whitman to the present.

4. The age of realism

——latter half of the nineteenth century

American Realism: 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. 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 commonplace and the low, and it offers an objective rather than an idealistic view of human nature and human experience.

Major Features:

1）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.

2） Open ending (means real life is complex and cannot be fully understood)

3） Focuses on the lives of the common people

4） Emphasize objectivity

Representatives:

Howells, Henry James

代表作：William Dean Howells The Rise of Silas Lapham

Henry James “The American”、“Daisy Miller”、“ in the Portrait of a Lady”

现实主义影响：Realism was a reaction against Romanticism and paved the way to Modernism。

5. Local Colorism（乡土文学）

local colorism is a type of writing that was popular in the late 19th(1860s—1870s).

Local Color Fiction:

Local colorism as a trend became dominant in American literature in the late 1860s and early 1870.

The frontier humorists who had been popular with their “tall tales” before the Civil War pav ed the way for local color fiction. Basic Features

Local color fiction presents a locale which is distinguished form the outside world.

Local color fiction describes the exotic and the picturesque. It describes things that are not common in other regions. Local color fiction also attempts to show things as they as they are.

Local color fiction glorifies the past. (nostalgic about the past)

Local color fiction stresses the influence of setting on character.

Masters：

Mark Twain（笔名）

Samuel Langhorne Clemens

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

6. American naturalism

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.

Background:

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 hopeless.

Major Features:

Humans are controlled by laws of heredity and environment

The universe is cold, godless, indifferent and hostile to human desires.

Representatives:

The pessimism and deterministic ideas of naturalism pervaded the works of such American writers as Stephen Crane, Frank Norris, Jack London and Theodore Dreiser.

Crane?s Maggie: A Girl of the Streets is the first A merican naturalism work. Norris?s McTeague is the manifesto of American naturalism. Dreiser?s Sister Carrie is the work in which naturalism attained maturity. These writers? detailed description of the lives of the downtrodden and the abnormal, their frank threatment of human passion and sexuality, and their portrayal of men and women overwhelmed by blind forces of nature still exert a powerful influence on modern writers.

Influence:

Although naturalist literature described the world with sometimes brutal realism, it sometimes also aimed at bettering the world through social reform. This combination of grim reality and desire for improvements is typical of America as it moved into the twentieth century.

7. Imagism

A poetic movement of England and the U.S. that flourished from 1909 to 1917. The movement insists on the creation of images in poetry by “the direct treatment of the thing” and the economy of wording. “poetic techniques to record exactly the momentary impressions”

Major features:

--- it was one of the most essential technique of writing poetry in modern period.

--- with a spirit of revolt against conventions, imagism was anti—romantic and anti-victorian

--- In a sense, imagism was equivalent to naturalism in fiction

--- it produced free verse without imposing a rhythmical pattern.

--- Imagism tried to record objective observations of an object or a situation without interpretation or comment by the poet. --- it produced free verse without imposing a rhythmical pattern.

--- Imagism tried to record objective observations of an object or a situation without interpretation or comment by the poet. The most outstanding figures:

Ezra Pound Amy Lowell Hilda Doolittle

The form of free verse (Ezra Loomis Pound)

影响：.its influence

1)the imagist theories call for brief language, describing the precise picture in as few words as possible. This new way of poetry composition has a lasting influence in the 20th century poetry. 2)the second lasting influence of Imagism is the form of free verse. There are no metrical rules. There are apparent indiscriminate line breaks, which reflects the discontinuity of life itself. That is art of the poem. The poet uses the length of the lines and the strange groupings of words to show how life itself can be broken up into somehow meaningless clusters

8. Free verse:

Free verse was originated by a group of French poets of the late 19th century.

Poetry that is based on the irregular rhythmic cadence(韵律) of the recurrence, with variations, of phrases, images, and syntactical(依照句法的) patterns rather than the conventional use of meter（音步）. Rhyme may or may not be present in it, but when it is , it is used with great freedom.

Their purpose was to free themselves from the restrictions of formal metrical patterns and to recreate instead the free rhymes of nature period. Walt Whitman…s leaves of grass is perhaps the most notable example.

It has since been used Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot and other major American poets of the 20th century. Walt Whiteman?s Leaves of Grass is, perhaps , the most notable example.

9. 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 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 F.Scott Fitzgerald, Hemingway and John dos Passos.

10. Code hero:

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.

11. Iceberg Theory

Ernest Hemingway?s “iceberg theory” suggests that the writer include in the text only a small portion of what he knows, leaving about ninety percent of the content a mystery that grows beneath the surface of the writing. If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water.

A good writer does not need to reveal every detail of a character or action

12. Jazz 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”.

美国文学史复习提纲 名词解释

I. Explain the following literary terms(名词解释). 1. Romanticism The most profound and comprehensive idea of romanticism is the vision of a greater personal freedom for the individual. Appeals to imagination; Stress on emotion rather than reason; optimism, gen iality. Subjectivity: in form and meaning. 2 American transcendentalism American transcendentalism was an important movement in philosophy and literature that flourished during the early to middle years of the nineteenth century (about 1836-1860). For the transcendentalists, the soul of each individual is identical with the soul of the world and contains what the world contains. 3 Realism: ―nothing more and nothing less than the truthful treatment of material.‖ the Civil war a. verisimilitude of details derived from observation b. representative in plot, setting and character c. an objective rather than an idealized view of human experience or（American Realism: 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. 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 commonplace and the low, and it offers an objective rather than an idealistic view of human nature and human experience.） 4. Modernism like modernism in general is a trend of thought that affirms the power of human beings to create, improve, and reshape their environment, with the aid of scientific knowledge, technology and practical experimentation, and is thus in its essence both progressive and optimistic. The general term covers many political, cultural and artistic movements rooted in the changes in Western society at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century. American modernism is an artistic and cultural movement in the United States starting at the turn of the 20th century with its core period between World War I and World War II and continuing into the 21st century. 5、American Puritanism: Puritanism is the practices and beliefs of the Puritans. The Puritans were originally members of a division of the Protestant Church. The first settlers who became the founding fathers of the American nation were quite a few of them. They were a group of serious, religious people, advocating highly religious and moral principles. As the word itself hints, Puritans wanted to purity their religious beliefs and practices. They accepted the doctrine of predestination, original sin and total depravity, and limited atonement through a special infusion of grace form God. As a culture heritage, Puritanism did have a profound influence on the early American mind. American Puritanism also had a enduring influence on American literature. 6、Transcendentalism: In New England, an intellectual movement known as transcendentalism developed as an American version of Romanticism. The movement began among an influential set of authors based in Concord, Massachusetts and was led by Ralph Waldo Emerson. Like Romanticism, transcendentalism rejected both 18th century rationalism and established religion, which for the transcendentalists meant the Puritan tradition in particular. 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. 7、Free verse: free verse is the rhymed or unrhymed poetry composed without attention to conventio nal rules of meter. Free verse was first written and labeled by a group of French poets of the late 19th century. Their purpose was to deliver poetry from the restrictions of formal metrical patterns and to recreate the free rhythms of natural speech. Walt Whitman was the precursor who wrote lines of varying length and cadence, usually not rhymed. The emotional content or meaning of the work was expressed through its rhythm. Free verse has been characteristic of the work of many modern American poets, including Ezra Pound and Carl Sandburg. 8、Naturalism: A more deliberate kind of realism in novels, stories and plays, usually involving a view of human beings as passive victims of natural forces and social environment. Naturalism was a new and harsher realism. It

History and Anthology of American Literature 美国文学史及选读 笔记

History and Anthology of American Literature Part I The Literature of Colonial America 1.Historical Introduction ·The first permanent English settlement in North America was established at Jamestown, Virginia in 1607. ·Among the members of the small band of Jamestown settlers was Captain John Smith. His reports of exploration have been described as the first distinctly American literature written in English. 2.Early New England Literature ·The American poets who emerged in the 17 century adapted the style of established European poets to the subject matter confronted in a strange, new environment. Anne Bradstreet was one such poet. John Smith 1.The first American writer. 2.Works: (1)A true Relation of Such Occurrences and Accidents of Note as Hath Happened in Virginia Since the First Planting of That Colony (2)A Map of Virginia with a Description of the Country (3)The General History of Virginia, New England, and the Summer Isles William Bradford & John Winthrop 1.William Bradford: 曾任普利茅斯总督 ·Work: Of Plymouth Plantation《普利茅斯垦殖记》 2.John Winthrop: 曾任马萨诸塞湾总督，波士顿总督 ·Work: The History of New England from 1630 to 1649《新英格兰历史：1630-1649》 John Cotton & Roger Williams 1.John Cotton: 清教徒牧师和作家 ·The first major intellectual spokesman of Massachusetts Bay Colony was John Cotton, sometimes called “the Patriarch of New England”. 2.Roger Williams: 出生于伦敦的进步宗教思想家，曾长期受到英国殖民当局的迫害 ·He was interested in the Indian language ·Work：A Key into the Language of America 《阿美利加语言的钥匙》 Anne Bradstreet & Edward Taylor 1.Anne Bradstreet：美国第一位作品得以发表的女诗人 ·Work：The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung up in America《第十位缪斯》 2.Edward Taylor：美国清教派牧师和诗人，被公认为美国19世纪前最重要的诗人 ·The best of the Puritan poets Part II The Literature of Reason and Revolution 1.Background: In the seventies of the eighteenth century the English colonies in North America rose in arms against their mother country. The War of Independence lasted for eight years(1775-1783) and ended in the formation of a federative bourgeois democratic republic—the United States of America. 2.American Enlightenment（美国启蒙运动）dealt a decisive blow to the Puritan traditions and brought to life secular

美国文学史及选读试卷 (1)

美国文学史及选读试卷 Ⅰ.Each of the following statements below is followed by four alternatives. Choose the one that would best complete the statement. (60points in all, 2 for each) 1. Which of following can be said of the common features which are shared by the English and American Romanticists ? A. An increasing emphasis on the free expression of emotions. B. An increasing attention to the psychic states of their characters. C. An increasing emphasis on the desire to return to nature. D. both A and B. 2. Which of the following statements about the Romantic period in the history of American literature is NOT true? （） A. In most of the American writings of this period there was a new emphasis upon the imaginative and emotional qualities of literature. B. The writers of this period placed an increasing emphasis on the free expression of emotions and displayed an increasing attention to the psychic states of their characters. C. There was a strong tendency to exalt the individual and the common man. D. Most heroes and heroines in the writings of this period exhibited extremes of reason and nationality. 3.______ is unanimously agreed to be the summit of the American Romanticism in the history of American literature. A. New England Transcendentalism B. England Transcendentalism C. the Harlem Renaissance D. New Transcendentalism 4.Hawthorn e’s unique gift was for the creation of ______ which touch the deepest roots of man’s moral nature. A. symbolic stories B. romantic stories

美国文学史名词解释

1、the Lost Generation In general, the post-World War I generation, but specifically a group of U.S. writers who came of age during the war and established their literary reputations in the 1920s. The term stems from a remark made by Gertrude Stein to Ernest Hemingway, “You are all a lost generation.” Hemingway used it as an epigraph to The Sun Also Rises (1926). The generation was “lost” in the sense that its inherited values were no longer relevant in the postwar world and because of its spiritual alienation from a U.S. that, b asking under President Harding's “back to normalcy” policy, seemed to its members to be hopelessly provincial, materialistic, and emotionally barren. The term embraces Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Dos Passos, e.e. cummings and many other writers who made Paris the centre of their literary activities in the '20s. They were never a literary school. In the 1930s, as these writers turned in different directions, their works lost the distinctive stamp of the postwar period. The last representative works of the era were Fitzgerald's Tender Lost generation 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 F.Scott Fitzgerald, Hemingway and John dos Passos. 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. 2、Iceberg Theory 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. Iceberg Theory Ernest Hemingway’s “iceberg theory” sugge sts that the writer include in the text only a small portion of what he knows, leaving about ninety percent of the content a mystery that grows beneath the surface of the writing. If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of

美国文学史

美国文学史梗概 一、殖民地时代和美国建国初期 最早来自这片新大陆的欧洲移民主要是定居在新英格兰的清教徒和马萨诸塞的罗马天主教徒，二者虽然在教义上有很多不同之处，但他们都信奉加尔文主义：人生在世只是为了受苦受难，而他们唯一的希望是争做上帝的“选民”，死后进天国，相信“原罪”。这时的文学作品也主要反映了这些思想，和欧洲文学一脉相承。 代表作家：考顿·马瑟，乔纳森·爱德华兹，安妮·布拉兹特里特，爱德华·泰勒。 二、18世纪独立战争胜利后，美国经济社会进入稳步发展时期 这一时期是启蒙运动时期（the Enlightenment）,从字面上讲，启蒙运

动就是启迪蒙昧，反对愚昧主义，提倡普及文化教育的运动。但就其精神实质上看，它是宣扬资产阶级政治思想体系的运动，并非单纯是文学运动。它是文艺复兴时期资产阶级反封建、反禁欲、反教会斗争的继续和发展，直接为一七八九年的法国大革命奠定了思想基础。启蒙思想家们从人文主义者手里进一步从理论上证明封建制度的不合理，从而提出一整套哲学理论，政治纲领和社会改革方案，要求建立一个以“理性”为基础的社会。他们用政治自由对抗专制暴政，用信仰自由对抗宗教压迫，用自然神论和无神论来摧毁天主教权威和宗教偶像，用“天赋人权”的口号来反对“君权神授”的观点，用“人人在法律面前平等”来反对贵族的等级特权，进而建立资产阶级的政权。是欧洲第二次思想解放运动。） 主要文学指导思想是“自然神论”（Deism），这个思想认为虽然上帝创造了宇宙和它存在的规则，但是在此之

后上帝并不再对这个世界的发展产生影响。自然神论反对蒙昧主义和神秘主义，否定迷信和各种违反自然规律的“奇迹”；认为上帝不过是“世界理性”或“有智慧的意志”；上帝作为世界的“始因”或“造物主”，它在创世之后就不再干预世界事务，而让世界按照它本身的规律存在和发展下去；主张用“理性宗教”代替“天启宗教”。人生在世，不再是受苦受难以换取来世的新生，而是要消灭种族、性别和信仰的不平等，建立自己的“人间乐园”。 启蒙运动中出现大量优秀的散文作品，并多出自开国元勋之手，如本杰明·富兰克林，托马斯·潘恩，以及托马斯·杰斐逊。 三、19世纪南北战争时期 这一时期的文学先后发展了浪漫主义，现实主义和自然主义。

美国文学史及选读复习重点

Captain John Smith (first American writer). Anne Bradstreet；The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America （colonists living） Edward Taylor(the best puritan poet) John Cotton ”the Patriarch of New England” teacher spiritual leader Benjamin Franklin The Autobiography Poor Richard’s Almanack Thomas Jefferson： Political Career Thoughts The Declaration of Independence we hold truth to be self-evidence Philip Freneau“Father of American Poetry” The Wild Honey Suckle American Romanticism optimism and hope Nationalism Washington Irving“Father of American Literature short story”The first “Pure Writer” A History of New York The Sketch Book marked the beginning of American Romanticism! “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”Rip Van Winkle James Fenimore Cooper Father of American sea and frontier novels Leather stocking Tales The Last of the Mohicans The Pioneers The Prairie The Pathfinder The Deerslayer Edgar Allan Poe father of detective story and horror fiction Tales of the Grotesque and the Arabesque “MS. Found in a Bottle” “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” “The Fall of the House of Usher”“The Masque of the Red Death”“The

美国文学简史名词解释定义

American Puritanism: Puritanism was a religious reform movement that arose within the Church of England in the late sixteenth century. Under siege from church and crown, it sent an offshoot in the third and forth decades of the seventeenth century to the northern English colonies in the New World--- a migration that laid the foundation for the religious, intellectual, and social order of New England, Puritanism, however,was not only a historically specific phenomenon coincident with the founding of New England; it was also a way of being in the world---a style of response to lived experience---that has reverberated through American life ever since. Doctrinally, Puritans adhered to the Five Points of Calvinism as codified at the Synod of Dort in 1619:(1) unconditional election ( the idea that God had decreed who was damned and who was saved from before the beginning of the world); (2) limited atonement ( the idea that Christ died for the elect only); (3) total depravity (humanity's utter corruption since the Fall); (4) irresistible grace (regeneration as entirely a work of God, which cannot be resisted and to which the sinner contributes nothing); and (5) the perseverance of the saints (the elect, despite their backsliding and faintness of heart , cannot fall away from grace). American Dream: The American Dream is the faith held by many in the United States of America that through hard work, courage, and determination one can achieve a better life for oneself, usually through financial prosperity. These were values held by many early European settlers, and have been passed on to subsequent generations. Nowadays the American Dream has led to an emphasis on material wealth as a measure of success and\ or happiness. Gothic tradition: Gothic novel or Gothic romance is a story of terror and suspense, usually set in a gloomy old castle or monastery. In an extended sense, many novels that do not have a medievalized setting, but which share a comparably sinister, grotesque, or chaustrophobic atmosphere have been classed as Gothic. It contributed to the new emotional climate of Romanticism. Historical novel: a novel in which the action takes place during a specific historical period well before the time of writing ( often one or two generations before, sometimes several centuries), and in which some attempt is made to depict accurately the customs and mentality of the period. The central character---real or imagined---is usually subject to divided loyalties within a larger historic conflict of which readers know the outcome. The pioneers of this genre were Walter Scott and James Fenimore Cooper American Romanticism:Romanticism refers to an artistic and intellectual movement originating in Europe in the late 18th century and characterized by a heightened interest in nature, emphasis on the individual's expression of emotion and imagination, departure from the attitudes and forms of classicism, and rebellion against established social rules and conventions. The romantic period in American literature stretched from the end of the 18th century through the outbreak of the Civil

美国文学史习题 (1)

I. Multiple choice. Please choose the best answer among the four items. (10 x 1’= 10’) 1. In American literature, the 18th century was the age of Enlightenment. ____ was the dominant. 2. The short story “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” is taken from Irving’s work named ____. 3. Which of the following is not the characteristic of American Romanticism? 4. The short story “Rip Van Winkle” reveals the __ attitude of its author.

5.Stylistically, Henry James’ fiction is characterized by ___. 6.Transcendentalist doctrines found their greatest literary advocates in ___ and Thoreau. 7.Which is regarded as the “Declaration of Intellectual Independence”? 8.____ is considered Mark Twain’s greatest achievement.

美国文学史名词解释

1.American Puritanism清教 2.It comes from the American puritans, who were the first immigrants moved to American continent in the 17th century. Original sin, predestination（预言）and salvation（拯救）were the basic ideas of American Puritanism. And, hard-working, piousness（虔诚,尽职），thrift and sobriety（清醒）were praised. Characteristics: 特点 1. Idealistic: Puritans pursue the purity and simplicity in worship. They focuse the glory of God, and the angry believe in the doctrine of destiny, original sin, limited atonement 2. Practical: Puritans come to Amrican to do business and make profits with the desire of chasing wealth and status. They have to struggle for survival under the severity of the western frontier. 3 .The struggle between the spiritual and the material is the basics of the Puritan mind. On the one hand, Puritans chase the purity of the early the other hand, they come to America to earn money. This contradictory will be reflected by their thoughts. 4. In a word, it rests on purity, ambition, harding work, and an intense struggling for success. Romanticism浪漫主义: the literature term was first applied to the writers of the 18th century in Europe who broke away from the formal rules of classical writing. When it was used in American literature it referred to the writers of the middle of the 19th century who stimulated（刺激）the sentimental emotions of their readers. They wrote of the mysterious of life, love, birth and death. The Romantic writers expressed themselves freely and without restraint. They wrote all kinds of materials, poetry, essays, plays, fictions, history, works of travel, and biography. Transcendentalism先验说,超越论: is a philosophic and literary movement that flourished in New England, particular at Concord, as a reaction against Rationalism and Calvinism (理性主义and喀尔文主义). Mainly it stressed intuitive understanding of God, without the help of the church, and advocated independence of the mind. The representative writers are Emerson and Thoreau. American Realism现实主义: 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. 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 commonplace and the low, and it offers an objective rather than an idealistic view of human nature and human experience Local colorism乡土文学: as a trend became dominant in American literature in the 1860s and early 1870s，it is defined by Hamlin Garland as having such quality of texture and background that it could not have been written in any other place or by anyone else than a native stories of local colorism have a quality of circumstantial(详细的) authenticity(确实性), as local colorists tried to immortalize(使不朽) the distinctive natural, social and linguistic features. It is characteristic of vernacular(本国语) language and satirical(讽刺的) humor Naturalism自然主义: American naturalism was a new and harsher realism. American naturalism had been shaped by the war; by the social upheavals（剧变）that undermined the comforting faith of an earlier age. 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. Although naturalist literature described the world with sometimes brutal realism, it sometimes also aimed at bettering the world through social reform. Stream of consciousness意识流：It is one of the modern literary techniques. It is the style of writing that attempts to imitate the natural flow of a character’s thoughts, feelings, reflections, memories, and mental images as the character experiences them. It was first used in 1922 by the Irish novelist James Joyce. Those novels broke