英美文学名词解释

英美文学名词解释 1. Free Verse: Poetry without a fixed beat or regular rhyme scheme or line length and depends on natural speech rhythms. Whitman was the first American poet to write free verse. The masterpiece is Leaves of Grass. 2. Transcendentalism: Among transcendentalists' core beliefs was the belief in an ideal spiritual state that "transcends" the physical and empirical and is realized only through the individual's intuition, rather than through the doctrines of established religions. Nature was, to them, alive, filled with God‘s overwhelming presence. Transcendentalism is based on the belief that the most fundamental truths about life and death can be reached only by going beyond the world of the senses. Emerson was an outstanding transcendental writer. 3. American Realism: It expressed the concern for the world of experience, of the commonplace, and for the familiar and the low. The American realists advocated ―verisimilitude of detail derived from observation,‖ the effort to approach the norm of experience —— a reliance on the representative in plot, setting, and character, and to offer an objective rather than an idealized view of human nature and experience. Mark Twain, Henry James and Howells were the important writers. 4. American Naturalism: It used detailed realism to suggest tat social conditions, heredity, and environment had inescapable force in shaping human character. Naturalistic writers were influenced by Darwin‘s theory of evolution. The representatives are Theodore Dreiser and Stephen Crane. 5. Local Colorism: Simply it means the use of regional detail in a literary or artistic work. Local colorists concerned themselves with presenting and interpreting the local character of their regions. Their truthful depiction common people in their common place lives added strength to the flight for realism which Howells championed with James and Mark Twain. Edgar Allen Poe’s ideas about art? Literary theory Themes: 1. Death – predominant theme ―Poe is not interested in anything alive. Everything in Poe‘s writings is dead.‖ 2. Horror 3.negative thoughts of science Themes 4. Love - usually of a mourning man for his deceased beloved. 5. Pride - physical and intellectual. 6. Beauty - of a young woman either dying or dead. Poe‘s theory for poetry poems short but achieve maximum effect, produce a feeling of beauty in the reader "pure―, not to moralize; He stresses rhythm insists on an even metrical flow Poe‘s theory for short story Short story should be of brevity, totality, single effect, compression and finality. Poet‘s achievement: 1. His aesthetics, his call for ―the rhythmical creation of beauty‖ have influenced French symbolists and the devotees of "art for art's sake." ) criticism. 2. He is the father of psychoanalytic(心理分析的 3. He is the father of the detective story. What is American Realism? The Age of Realism 1865 to 1914 against Romanticism paved the way to Modernism What is American realism? As a literary movement realism came in the latter half of the nineteenth century as a reaction against ―the lie‖ of romanticism and sentimentalism. It expressed the concern for the world of experience, of the commonplace, and for the familiar and the low. The American realists advocated ―verisimilitude(逼真) of detail derived from observation,‖ the effort to approach the norm of experience —— a reliance on the representative in plot, setting, and character, and to offer an objective rather than an idealized view of human nature and experience. Characteristics of American Realism 1.truthful description of life 2.typical character under typical circumstance 3.objective rather than idealized, close observation and investigation of life ―Realistic writers are like scientists‖. 4. Concerned with social and psychological problems 5.open-ending: leaves much room for readers to think by themselves. 6. Optimistic tone Features of Emily Dickinson’s Poems In subject matter Emily Dickinson was very similar to the great romantic poets of her time. Her poems are short, many of them being based on a single image or symbol. But within her little lyrics she wrote about some of the most important things in life: love, nature, morality and immortality. She wrote about success, which she thought she never achieved; and she wrote about failure, which she considered her constant companion. She wrote of these things so brilliantly that she is now ranked as one of American‘s greatest poets. Despite her seclusion of life, Emily Dickinson covered a wide range of subjects in poetry. Her favorite subjects are love, death or natural beauty. In her writing she wrote about life and death, expecting to understand the meaning of life by understanding the meaning of death. thLiving in the 19 century, comparatively religious era, she did not belong to any organized religion. However, she wrote of God, man and nature; she probed into the spiritual unrest of man and often doubted about the existence and benevolence of God, because she felt that wild nature was her church and she was able to converse directly with God there. 1. Her gemlike poems are all very short, but fresh and original, marked by the vigor of her images, the daring of her thought and the beauty of her expression. Emily Dickinson wrote in the conventional metrical form, though she did not always strictly observes the rules of versification. Emily Dickinson defamiliarized conventional poetic form, deliberately overusing capitalization and dashes, to make her poems looking strange. In some way, she is very much similar to the style of John ?Donne. Poetic features of Walt Whitman 1. Walt Whitman was one of the most important American poets in the nineteenth century and one of the great innovators in American literature. In the preface to his Leaves of Grass, he says that one of his focuses is on the sort of poet America required and the sort of poetry America needed. 2. The great American poet would create both new forms and new subject matter for poetry. 3. In terms of content, American poetry would not echo the sad complaints of the Graveyard school nor follow the moral preaching of didactic poets. As a matter of fact, Whitman himself was that poet and his Leaves of Grass is an example of that poetry. Whitman‘s poetry is typical of America‘s. 4. Leaves of Grass grew and changed as he and his nation, America, grew and changed. 5. He saw reality as a continuous flow, without a beginning or end. He disliked the nineteenth-century poetic forms that are stiff and patterned. Most of the poems in Leaves of Grass are about man and nature, especially common people and ordinary Americans. 6. He wanted his poetry to be for the common people. He was determined ―to meet people and the States face to face, to confront them with an American rude tongue‖. 7. In the area of poetic form, Whitman made his great contributions. Through him, American poets finally freed themselves from the old English traditions. Throughout his life he advocated a completely new and completely American form of poetic expression. 8. The poetic form he employed is now called free verse ---- the verse that does not follow a fixed metrical pattern, the verse without a fixed beat or regular rhyme scheme. 9. Whitman thought that message was always more important than form. So he always developed his style to suit his message and the audience he hoped to reach. 10. He abandoned conventional and hackneyed poetic figures and drew his symbolism freely from his experience. He remains one of American most important poets because he announced and instructed a completely new age. The arrow and the song 赏析:The poem was written by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. He was an American romantic poet. Images: the arrow, the song The arrow and the song is also one of his famous poems. It seems to mean simple, obvious and fingertips, in fact, it is deep and imaginative. Features: 1.Rhyme: sight-flight strong-song oak-unbroke end-friend 2. In daily life, there is no relation between an arrow and a song. In this poem, the arrow and the song have something in common. Firstly, they both fly fast, no one can catch them; secondly, they both disappear in the air, no one knows their whereabouts. In the third section, the poet linked the two images together, making the poem fluent and easy to understand. Topic: The poet wrote this famous poem to praise friendship. Can you imagine the feeling when you have already forgotten something words you ever said or something you did, but you friend still remember? Just like the poet. He sang a song and then he forgot it. But his friend bore it in mind for a long time.