美国文学名词解释

美国文学名词解释 Realism a mode of writing that gives the impression of recording or reflecting faithfully an actual way of life。Realism focuses on commonness of the lives of the common people. Realism emphasizes objectivity and offers an objective human nature and human experience.American Naturalism: Pessimistic realism. Civil war, social upheavals, Darwinism 。 Naturalistic writers attempt to apply scientific principles of objecting and detachment to its study of human beings unlike realism which focus on literary technique ,naturalism implies a philosophical position .for naturalistic writers ,since human beings are ,in Emile Zola’s “human beasts “.characters can be studied through their relationship to their surrounds .naturalistic writers used a version of the scientific method to write their novels :they studied human beings governed by their instinct and passions as well as the way in which the characters lives were governed by force of heredity and environment . Jazz Age: after WWI, people found that the war which cost millions of lives failed to provide an abiding solution to the world’s problems, that the war was just the traps of political leaders. Such disillusionment about the value of war, accompanied by the booming of American economy drove people to cynical hedonism. People experiment with new amusements. They restlessly pursued stimulus and pleasures; wallow in heavy drinking, fast driving and casual sex. By these, they hoped to seek relief from serious problems. Transcendentalism Appeared in 1830, marked the maturity of American romanticism and the first renaissance in the American literary history 。It was a romantic idealism, or philosophical romanticism. Black Humor. In contemporary literary criticism, black humor is a term applied to a large group of American novels beginning in the 1950s. It is humor out of despair and laughter out of tears.Romanticism had appeared in England in the last years of the eighteenth century. It spread to continental Europe and then came to America early in the nineteenth century. It came into being as a reaction against the prevailing neoclassical spirit and rationalism during the Age of Reason.Image: 1. literature is a medium which promoted visual responses in the reader. Imagination is a faculty for visualization. 2. any sensuous effect provoked by literary language, any striking language, symbols, metaphors, figures. Imagery is the use of descriptive language to re-create sensory experiences. An image is a verbal picture of an object, action, abstract idea, or sensation. It is often created by using figures of speech. There are ways making an idea or picture come closer into focus by relating the idea or experience to another that may be more familiar to the reader. . Novel: an art form of penetrating analysis of individual, confronting society, chronicles of the psychological perceptions that James himself defined as the highest form of experience.Lost Generation:Refers to those writers who were devoid of faith, values and ideals and who were alienated from the civilization the capitalist society advocated. It includes the writers such as (Hemingway, F.S. Fitzgerald, Thomas Wolfe) and poets (like Ezra Pound), who rebelled against former values and ideas, but replaced them only by despair 。 Beat Generation:Identifies a loose-kit group of poets and novelists, writing in the second half of the 1950s and early 1960s, who shared a set of social attitudes—antiestablishment, anti-political, anti-intellectual, opposed to the prevailing cultural, and moral values, and in favor of unfettered self-realization and self-expression. Juxtaposition: placing together two contrasting objects, images, or ideas, in which one of the elements ironically undercuts the other, so as to produce a striking effect and emphasize the differences between them. Code hero as a man who lives correctly, following the idea of honor, courage and endurance in the world that is sometimes chaotic, often stressful and always painful. He is alone even when with other people. He is a man’s man .He believes in nothing. Puritans: is English protestant, one division of Protestant (one division of Christianity, appeared in the 16th c, against the ruling Roman Catholic. Puritanism: a religious and political movement that developed in England about the middle of the 16th century and later spread influence into the New England in America. Free verse, also known as “open form” verse, is the verse without regular meter, line length, rhyme (scheme), or stanza form, depending on natural speech rhythms related to the actual cadence of the poet expressing himself. Poetry is an art of transforming an intensely personal moment /experience /emotion (subjective, inward) into an impersonal and communicable image (objective, outward) through language, with a certain form and context, line-length, rhyme-scheme, regular meter. The legend of sleepy hollow: The story is set circa 1790 in the Dutch settlement of Tarry Town, New York, in a secluded glen called Sleepy Hollow. It tells the story of Ichabod Crane, a lean, lanky, and extremely superstitious schoolmaster from Connecticut, who competes with Abraham "Brom Bones" Van Brunt, the town rowdy, for the hand of 18-year-old Katrina Van Tassel, the daughter and sole child of a wealthy farmer. As Crane leaves a party he attended at the Van Tassel home on an autumn night, he is pursued by the Headless Horseman, who is supposedly the ghost of a Hessian trooper who had his head shot off by a stray cannonball during "some nameless battle" of the American Revolutionary War, and who "rides forth to the scene of battle in nightly quest of his head". Ichabod mysteriously disappears from town, leaving Katrina to marry Brom Bones, who was "to look exceedingly knowing whenever the story of Ichabod was related". The dénouement of the fictional tale is set at the bridge over the Pocantico River in the area of the Old Dutch Church and Burying Ground in Sleepy Hollow. The characters of Ichabod Crane and Katrina Van Tassel may have been based on local residents known to the author. The character of Katrina is thought to have been based upon Eleanor Van Tassel Brush, in which case her name is derived from that of Eleanor's aunt Catriena Ecker Van Tessel. Although Irving knew an army colonel named Ichabod Crane from Staten Island, New York (who was also once the Commanding Officer of Lieutenant Stonewall Jackson), the character in "The Legend" may have been patterned after Jesse Merwin, who taught at the local schoolhouse in Kinderhook, further north along the Hudson River, where Irving spent several months in 1809. The Scarlet letter: The novel begins in 17th-century Boston, Massachusetts, then a Puritan settlement. A young woman, Hester Prynne, is led from the town prison with her infant daughter in her arms and the scarlet letter “A” on her bosom. The scarlet letter "A" represents the act of adultery that she has committed and it is to be a symbol of her sin – a badge of shame – for all to see. A man in the crowd tells an elderly onlooker that Hester is being punished for adultery. Hester's husband, who is much older than she is, sent her ahead to America while he settled some affairs in Europe. However, her husband never arrived in Boston. The consensus is that he has been lost at sea. While waiting for her husband, Hester has apparently had an affair, as she has given birth to a child. She will not reveal her lover’s identity, however, and the scarlet letter, along with her public shaming, is her punishment for her sin and her secrecy. On this day Hester is led to the town scaffold and harangued by the town fathers, but she again refuses to identify her child’s father.