英美文学名词解释
Allegory is a narrative that serves as an extended metaphor. Allegories are written in the form of fables, parables, poems, stories, and almost any other style or genre. The main purpose of an allegory is to tell a story that has characters, a setting, as well as other types of symbols, that have both literal and figurative meanings. One well-known example of an allegory is Dante’s The Divine Comedy.In Inferno, Dante is on a pilgrimage to try to understand his own life, but his character also represents every man who is in search of his purpose in the world.
Alliteration is a pattern of sound that includes the repetition of consonant sounds. The repetition can be located at the beginning of successive words or inside the words. Poets often use alliteration to audibly represent the action that is taking place.
Aside is an actor’s speech, directed to the audience, that is not supposed to be heard by other actors on stage. An aside is usually used to let the audience know what a character is about to do or what he or she is thinking. Asides are important because they increase an a
udience's involvement in a play by giving them vital information pertaining what is happening, both inside of a character's mind and in the plot of the play.
Gothic is a literary style popular during the end of the 18th century and the beginning of the 19th. This style usually portrayed fantastic tales dealing with horror, despair, the grotesque and other “dark” subjects. Gothic literature was named for the apparent influence of the dark gothic architecture of the period on the genre. Also, many of these Gothic tales took places in such “gothic” surroundings. Other times, this story of darkness may occur in a more everyday setting, such as the quaint house where the man goes mad from the "beating" of his guilt in Edgar Allan Poe's “The Tell-Tale Heart.”In essence, these stories were romances, largely due to their love of the imaginary over the logical, and were told from many different points of view.
IMAGERY: A common term of variable meaning, imagery includes the "mental pictures" that readers experience with a passage of literature. It signifies all the sensory perceptions referred to in a poem, whether by literal description, allusion, simile, or metaphor.
Modernism is vague term referring to the art, poetry, literature, architecture, and philosophy of Europe and America in the early twentieth-century. In general, modernism is marked by the following characteristics: (1) the desire to break away from established traditions, (2) a quest to find fresh ways to view man's position or function in the universe, (3) experiments in form and style, particularly with fragmentation--as opposed to the "organic" theories of literary unity appearing in the Romantic and Victorian periods.
Stream of Consciousness is the continuous flow of sense-perceptions, thoughts, feelings, and memories in the human mind. In literary works, it refers to the literary method of representing such a blending of mental processes in fictional characters, usually in an unpunctuated or disjointed form of interior monologue. It is an important device of modernist fiction pioneered by James Joyce and further developed by writers like William Faulkner.
Tragedy, according to Aristotle, is “the imita tion of an action that is serious and also, as having magnitude, complete in itself,” in the medium of poetic language and in the manner
of dramatic rather than of narrative presentation, involving “incidents arousing pity and fear, wherewith to accomplish the
catharsis of such emotions.” Arthur Miller’s The Death of a Salesman is a modern tragedy whose effect on the audience is one of compassionate understanding rather than of tragic pity and terror.
The Lost Generation
This term is applied to the American writers, most of whom were basically expatriates. They left America and formed a community of writers and artists in Paris, involved with other European novelists and poets in their experimentation on new modes of thought and expression. The term "Lost Generation " came from Gertrude Stein's remark to a mechanic in Hemingway's presence that "You are all a lost generation. " Hemingway used it as a motto in his novel The Sun Also Rises. Among those greatest figures in "The Lost Generation" are Ezra Pound, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and Hart Crane who lost the traditional values as a result of the war and fought hard to seek new values and bel
iefs to fill the void of the post - war world which was full of physical wounds as well as mental chaos.
genreImagism：Imagist is applied to a group of poets prominent in America between 1909 and 1918. Imagism was a spirit of revolt against conventionalities rather than a goal set up as in itself a permanently lasting objective.All poetic language is the language of exploration. The point of Imagism is that it does not use images as ornaments. The image is itself the speech. The image is the word beyond formulated language.The most conspicuous figures of the imagist movement were Ezra Pound, Amy Lowell, Carl Sandburg and William Carlos Williams.
Black Humor
Black humor is a term used in literature, drama, and film. It refers to grotesque or morbid humor used to express the absurdity, insensitivity, paradox, and cruelty of the modern world. Ordinary characters or situations are usually exaggerated far beyond the limits of normal satire or irony. Black humor uses devices often associated with tragedy and is some
times equated with tragic farce. For example, Catch-22 is the model representative of this type. The novels of such writers as Kurt Vonnegut, Thomas Pynchon, John Barth, Joseph Heller, and Philip Roth contain elements of black humor.

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