1 The Enlightenment启蒙运动: The Enlightenment was an intellectual movement originating in France, which attracted widespread support among the ruling and intellectual classes of Europe and North America in the second half of the 18th century. It characterizes the efforts by certain European writers to use critical reason to free minds from prejudice, unexamined authority and oppression by Church or State. Therefore, the Enlightenment is sometimes called the Age of Reason
2 American Dream美国梦: It is the faith held by many in the United States of America that through hard work, courage, and determination one can achieve a better life for oneself, usually through financial prosperity. These were values held by many early European settlers, and have been passed on to subsequent generations. Nowadays the American Dream has led to an emphasis on material wealth as measure of success or happiness
3. Transcendentalism 超验主义: It was a group of new ideas in literature, religion, culture and philosophy that emerged in New England in the middle 19th century. It began as a protest against the general state of culture and society. Among transcendentalist’s core beliefs was an ideal spiritual state that “transcends” the physical and empirical and is only realized through the individual’s intuition, rather than through the doctrines of established religions. Prominent transcendentalists included Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, etc. It is a kind of philosophy that stresses belief in transcendental things and the importance of spiritual rather than material existence.
4. American Puritanism美国清教主义: It is the practices and beliefs of the Puritans. The Puritans were originally members of a division of the Puritan Church. The first settlers who became the founding fathers of the American nation were quite a few of them. They were a group of serious, religious people, advocating highly religious and moral principles. As the word itself hints, Puritans wanted to purity their religious beliefs and practices. They accepted the doctrine of predestination, original sin and total depravity, and limited atonement through a special infusion of grace from God. As a culture heritage, Puritanism did have a profound influence on the early American mind. 5.Symbolism象征主义：It is the writing technique of using symbols. It’s a literary movement that arose in France in the last half of the 19th century and that greatly influenced many English writer, particularly poets, of the 20th century. It enables poets to compress a very complex idea or set of ideas into one image or even one word. It’s one of the most powerful devices that poets employ in creation.
7. Gothic novel哥特式小说：is a type of romance very popular late in the 18th century and at the beginning of the 19th century. Gothic novel emphasizes things which are grotesque， violent， mysterious， supernatural，desolate and horrifying. Gothic， originally in the sense of “medic，not classical”，with its descriptions of the dark，irrational side of human nature，Gothic novel has exerted a great influence over the writers of the Romantic period.
8 Imagism意象派: it’s a poetic movement of England and the U.S flourished from 1909 to 1917. The movement insists on the creation of images in poetry by “the direct treatment of the thing” and the economy of wording. The leaders of this movement were Ezra Pound and Amy Lowell.
9. Stream of Consciousness意识流: It is a style used in the presentation of the character’s inner working of mind. The assumption is that an individual’s
psychological processes are a continuous flow like a shifting, uninterrupted stream, highly changeable and confusing, often appearing illogical and contrary to reason. In tracing the stream of consciousness of an individual the writer may present interior monologue by his character, hint with symbols, reverse the order of time, and alternate recollections with the present or sometime illusions with given facts. 10. Point of view视角：It is a term referring to the vantage point or position from which a story is told. To identify the narrator of a story is to identify the story’s point of view. Basically there are two narrative ways: first-person point of view and the third-person point of view.
12. The Harlem Renaissance哈姆雷特文艺复兴: it was the first important movement in black American literature. Immediately after the First World War, as a result of a massive black migration to Northern cities, a group of young, talented black artists congregated in Harlem, a predominantly black section of New York City, and made it the cultural, and intellectual capital of black America. They carried forward the cultural traditions of their people and demonstrated their achievements to the white society that habitually ignored them.
13. Expressionism 表现主义: it arouse in German theater after World War I. Delighting in bizarre stage design and exaggerated makeup and costuming, expressionists sought to reflect intense states of emotion. Its mode is “the externalization of the inner.”
14. Black humor黑色幽默: It is a combination of humor with resentment, gloom, anger, and despair. Seeing all that is unreasonable, hypocritical, ugly, and even frenzied，writers of black humor nurse a grievance against their society which, according to them, is full of institutionalized absurdity. Yet they are cynical. They laugh a morbid laugh when facing the hideous. In hopeless indignation they take up freezing irony and burning satire as their weapons. Their novels are often in the form of anti-novel, devoid of completeness of plot and characterized by fragmentation and dislocation
15.American Romanticism浪漫主义：The Romantic Period stretches from the end of the 18th century through the outbreak of the Civil War. Romanticism was a rebellion against the objectivity of rationalism. For romantics, the feelings, intuitions and emotions were more important than reason and common sense. They emphasized individualism, placing the individual against the group, against authority. The affirmed the inner life of the self, and wanted to be free to develop and express his own inner thoughts.
16.Realism现实主义：As a literary movement, the Age of Realism came into existence after Romanticism with the Civil War It was a reaction against “the lie” of Romanticism and sentimentalism, and paved the way to Modernism. This literary interest in the so-called “reality” of life started a new period in the American literary writing known as The Age of Realism.
17.Local Colorism当地色彩is a type of writing that was popular in the late 19th(1860s—1870s). The feature of local colorism are: presenting a locale distinguished from the outside world; describing the exotic of the picturesque; glorifying the past; showing things as they are; influence of setting on characters. The well known local colorism authors were Mark Twain with his book Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Bret Harte’s with his The Luck of the Roaring Camp. 18. American Naturalism自然主义:
The American naturalists accepted the more negative interpretation of Darwin’s evolutio
nary theory and used it to accout for the behavior of those characters in literary works who were regarded as more or less complex combinations of inherited attributes, their habits conditioned by social and economic forces. naturalism is evolved from realism when the author’s tone in writing becomes less serious and less sympathetic but more ironic and more pessimistic. It is no more than a gloomy philosophical approach to reality, or to human existence. Dreiser with his Sister Carrie is a leading figure of his school.
19.The Modern Period Part现代时期 The 1920s-1930s ( the second renaissance of American literature) l The Roaring Twenties (economically) l The Jazz Age (socially) “lost” and “waste land” (spiritually) There had been a big flush of new theories and new ideas in both social and natural sciences. Darwinism(Darwin), Socialism (Karl Marx), Psychoanalysis (Sigmund Freud)
20.Lost generation迷惘的一代: The lost generation is a term first used by Stein to describe the post-war I generation of American writers: men and women haunted by a sense of betrayal and emptiness brought about by the destructiveness of the war. full of youthful idealism, these individuals sought the meaning of life, drank excessively, had love affairs and created some of the finest American literature to date. the three best-known representatives of lost generation are F.Scott Fitzgerald, Hemingway and John dos Passos.
21.The Beat Generation垮掉的一代: The Beat Generation is a group of American young writers and artists popular in the 1950s and early 1960s. the member of the beat generation were new bohemian libertines, who engaged in a spontaneous, sometimes messy creativity. The beat writers produced a body of written work controversial both for its advocacy of non conformity and for its non conforming style. The major writing are jack Kerouac’s on the road and Allen Ginsberg’s Howl.
22.American Dream美国梦：The is the idea held by many in the United States that through hard work, courage and determination one could achieve prosperity. These were values held by many early European settlers, and have been passed on to subsequent generations. The term was first used by James Truslow Adams in his book The Epic of America.
美国文学名词解释 (1)
