大学美国文学史术语解释打印_美国文学史术语解释

大学美国文学史术语解释打印由刀豆文库小编整理，希望给你工作、学习、生活带来方便，猜你可能喜欢“美国文学史术语解释”。

The romantic period stretched from the end of the eighteenth century through the outbreak of the Civil War.It is a term that is aociated with imagination andboundlene, as contrastedwith claicism, which is commonly aociated withreason and restriction.A romantic attitudemay be detected in literature of any period, but as an historical movement it arose in the 18th and 19th centuries, in reaction to

more rational literary, philosophic, artistic, religious, and economicstandards.The most clearly defined romantic literary movement in the U.S.wasTranscendentalism.Romantics frequently shared certain general characteristics: moral enthusiasm, faith in value of individualism and intuitive perception, and a presumption that the natural world was a source of goodne and man’s societies as a source of corruption.The representatives of the early period includes Washington Irving and James Fenimore Cooper, and those of the late period contain Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Edgar Allan Poe.As a literary movement,Realism came in the latter half of the 19th century as a reaction against the lie of romanticism and sentimentalism.It turned from an emphasis on the strange toward a faithful rendering of the ordinary, a slice of life as it is really lived.It exprees the concern for common place and the low, and it offers an objective rather an idealistic view of human nature and human experience.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.Realists looked for truth in everyday truths.Some of the representatives are William Dean Howells and Henry James The American Enlightenment is the intellectual thriving period in America in the mid-to-late 18th century(1715-1789),especially as it relates to American Revolution on the one hand the the European Enlightenment on the other.Influenced by the scientific revolution of the 17th century and the humanist period during the Renaiance, the Enlightenment took scientific reasoning and applied it to human nature,society and religion.Politically, the age is distinguished by an emphasis upon liberty,democracy, republicanism and religious tolerance--culminating in the drafting of the United States Declaration of Independence and Constitution.Attempts to reconcile science and religion resulted in a rejection of prophecy, miracle and revealed religion, often in preference for Deism.Historians have considered how the ideas of John Locke and republicanism merged to form Republicanism in the United States.The most important leaders of the American Enlightenment include Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson.Local colorism came into being in the late 1860s and early 1870s.The name is given especially to a kind of American literature that in its most characteristic form made its appearance just after the Civil War and for nearly three decades was the single most popular form of American literature.The ultimate aim of the local colorists is to write or present local characters of their regions in truthful depiction distinguished from others, usually a very small part of the world.The style of writing derived from the presentation of the features and peculiarities of a particular locality and its inhabitants.Simply it means The use of regional detail in a literary or artistic work.Following in the footsteps of the pre-war “sectional humorists,” local colorists were interested in realistically depicting life in different sections of the United States in order to promote understanding and unification.Fiction writers like Sarah Orne Jewett, Bret Harte, O.Henry, and Mark Twain have been identified within this tradition.By the 1930s, the local color style had spread beyond the bounds of novels and short stories into le formal territory like the “hometown material” section of local newspapers.Local color writing had always been premised（前提）on an informal approach and rejection of high-culture concerns.Now it entered ma media.Henry James’s fame rested largely upon his handling of his major fictional theme, the international theme, that is the meeting of America and Europe, American innocence in contact and contrast with cosmopolitan European decadence, and the moral and psychological complications arising therefrom.So he was called the cosmopolitan novelist.Naturalism was a literary movement taking place from the 1880s to 1940s thatused detailed realism to suggest that social conditions, heredity, and environment had inescapable force in shaping human character.It was depicted as a literary movement that seeks to replicate a believable everyday reality, as opposed to such movements as Romanticism or Surrealism.Naturalism is the outgrowth of literary realism.Naturalistic writers were influenced by Charles Darwin's theory of evolution.They believed that one's heredity and social environment largely determine one's character.WhereasRealism seeks only to describe subjects as they really are, naturalismalso attempts to determine “scientifically” the underlying forces(e.g.the environment or heredity)influencing the actions of its subjects.Naturalistic works often include uncouthor sordid subject matter;Naturalistic works exposed the dark harshne of life, including poverty, racism, violence, prejudice, disease, corruption, prostitution, and filth.As a result, naturalistic writers were frequently criticized for focusing toomuch on human vice(邪恶)and misery.