美国文学名词解释-（自动保存的）
1. American romanticism
①it is one of the most important periods in the history of American literature that stretches from the 18th century to the outbreak of the civil war. It started with the publication of Washington Irving’s The Sketch Book and ended with Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass.
②being a period of the great flowering of American literature, it is also called “the American Renaissance ”.
③American romantic works emphasize the imaginative and emotional qualities of nature literature. The strong tendency to eulogize the individual and common man was typical of this period. Most importantly, the writings of American Romanticism are typically American. Works concentrate
on unique characteristics of the American land.
④New England Transcendentalism is the summit of American Romanticism.
⑤Romanticists include such literary figures as Washington Irving, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, William Cullen Bryant, Henry Wordsworth Longfellow, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman and some others.
2. Free verse
free verse means the rhymed or unrhymed poetry composed without paying attention to conversational rules of meter. Free verse was originated by a group of French poets of the late 19th century. 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.
3. Transcendentalism \
①transcendentalism has been defined philosophically as “ the recognition in man of the capability of knowing truth intuitively, or of attaining knowledge transcending the reach of the senses.
②transcendentalists stress the importance of the Over-soul, the Individual and Nature. Other concepts that accompanied transcendentalism include the idea that nature is enabling and the idea that the individual is divine and, therefore, self-reliant. New England transcendentalism is the product of a combination of Native American Puritanism and European romanticism.
③some prominent representatives include Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau.
4. realism
①realism was a reaction against Romanticism and paved the way to Modernism.
②older generation, came up with a new inspiration. This new attitude was characterized by a great interest in the realities of life.It aimed at the interpretation of the realities of any aspect of life, free from subjective prejudice, idealism, or romantic color. Instead of thinking about the mysteries of life and death and heroic individualism, people’s attention was now directed to the interesting features of everyday existence, t o what was brutal or sordid and to the open portrayal of class struggle.
③so writers began to describe the integrity of human characters reacting under various circumstances and picture the pioneers of the Far West, the new immigrants and the struggles of the working class.
④Mark Twain, Howells, Henry James are three leading figures of the American Realism.
5. point of view
①the events of a story may be told as they appear to one or more participants or observers. In
first-person narration the point of view is automatically that of the narrator.
②more variation is possible in
third-person narration., where the author may choose to limit his or her report to what could have been observed or known by one of the characters at any given point in the
action----or may choose to report the observations and thoughts of several characters. Th
e author might to choose to intrude his or her own point of view.
6. Local colorism
Post-was American was large and diverse enough to sense its own local differences. Regional voices had emerged. Generally, the works by local colorists are concerned with the life of a small, well-defined region or province. The characteristic setting is the isolated town.
②Local colorists were consciously nostalgic historians of a vanishing way of life, recorders of a present that faded before your eyes. Yet for all their sentimentality, they dedicated themselves to minutely accurate descriptions of the life of their regions. They worked from
personal experience to record the facts of a local environment and suggested that the native life was shaped by the curious conditions of the locale.
③Major local colorists include Hamlin Garland, Mark Twain, and Kate Chopin, etc..
minimal7. American naturalism

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