Free verse
Free verse is poetry that has an irregular rhythm and line length and that attempts to avoid any predetermined verse structure; instead, it uses the cadences of natural speech. While it alternates stressed syllables as stricter verse forms do, free verse does so in a looser way.
Whitman?s poetry is an example of free verse at its most impressive. Free verse is a modern form of verse with no fixed foot, rhythm or rime schemes. Whitman pioneered the form and made the free verse acceptable in America poetry. It has since been used by Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens and other major American poets of the twentieth century.
Naturalism
It was a term created by the French novelist, Emile Zola. In studying human life, the naturalists used the discoveries and knowledge of modern science. They believed that people were not really “free”. Instead, their lives, opinions and morality were all controlled by social, economic and psychological causes.
American naturalists emphasized that world was amoral, that men and women had no free will, that religious truths were illusory and that human were destined to live in misery and oblivion. They depicted a pessimistic and deterministic pictures of the lives of the down-trodden and the abnormal。
Modernism
During the first decades of the 20th century, modernism became an international tendency against positivism and representational art in art and literature. It began in Germany in the 1890s, spread worldwide, and ended in the early 1940s. The essence of modernism was a break with the past, and it also fostered a belief in art and literature as an avenue to self-fulfillment.
The distinctive feature of literary modernism was its strong and conscious break with traditional forms, perceptions, and techniques of expression, and techniques of expression, and its great concern with language and all aspects of its medium. Steam of consciousness, the use of myth as a structure principle, and the primary status given to the poetic image, all challenged traditional representation. Generally speaking, this new desire in craftsmanship and skill was one of the hallmarks of the early decades of the 29th century.
Imagism
The emphasis was now on the economy of expression and on the use of a dominant image. The movement which had these as its aims is known in literary history as Imagism. Its prime mover was Ezra pound, an expatriate American poet who translated some of Li Po?s poems and wrote his The Cantos, quoting extensively from Chinese history and Confucius. Although short-lived, the Imagist movement had a
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tremendous influence on modern poetry. Most of the important twentieth-century American poets were related with it: William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, E.E.Cummings, to name just the important few.
The Imagists wanted “direct treatment of the ?thing? ” and a rhythm like that of a musical phrase. Instead of having the poet tell us what we should be feeling, Pound and his colleagues wanted an image to produce the emotion, to “speak for itself”.
Lost generation
The term “Lost Generation” was first used by Gertrude Stein, one of the leaders of this group. It included the young English and American expatriates as well as men and women caught in the war and cut off from the old values and yet unable to come to terms with the new era when civilization had gone mad. It means this generation has lost the beautiful sense of calm idyllic past. Yet in fact, they were lost in disillusionment and existential voids. They indulged in hedonism in order to make their life less unbearable.
For American expatriates, they had cut themselves from their past in order to search for the meaning of their American experience. They lost their sense of being a part of American society. Since none of the best writers was closer to combat, it was not the war itself, but long exposure to European culture which intensified their criticism of American life. Now although they lived in Europe, they still thought about what meant to be in America. So the lost generation stayed away from America to understand it better.
The jazz age
To many, World War Ι was a tragic failure of old values, of old politics, of old ideas. The social mood was often one of confusion and desire. Characters in this period live in restless pursuit of stimulus and pleasure, and wallow in heavy drinking, fast driving and casual sex.
Harlem Renaissance
In the 1920s in America, there was an upsurge of Black literature, popularly known as “Harlem Renaissance”, out of which such eminent literary figures as Langston Hughes grew. So, Harlem Renaissance is a burst of literary achievement in the 1920s by Negro playwrights, poets and novelists who presented new insights in the American experience and paved the way for the flourishment of Black literature in the mid-century.
Waste Land Painters
Waste Land Painters refer to such writers as F.Scott Fitzgerald, T.S. Eliot, Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner. With their writings, all of them painted the postwar Western world as a waste land, lifeless and hopeless. Eliot?s The Waste Land
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paints a picture of modern social crisis. In this poem, modern civilized society turns into a waste deathly land due to ethical degradation and disillusionment with dreams. His “The Hollow Men” exhibited a pessimism no less depressing than The Waste Land. Fitzgerald?s The Great Gatsby wrote about the frustration and despair resulting from the failure of the American dream. Hemingway?s works, such as The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms, portrayed the dilemma of modern man utterly thrown upon himself for survival in an indifferent world, revealing man?s impotence and his despairing courage to assert himself against overwhelming odds. Faulkner made the history of the Deep South the subject of the bulk of his work, and created a symbolic picture of the remote past. His fictional Yoknapatawpha represents a microcosm of the whole macrocosmic nature of human experience.
Hemingway Heroes
Hemingway Heroes refer to some protagonists in Hemingway?s works. Such a hero usually is an average man of decidedly masculine tastes, sensitive and intelligent. And usually he is a man of action and of few words. He is such an individualist, alone even when with other people, somewhat an outsider, keeping emotions under control, stoic and self-disciplined in a dreadful place where one can not get happiness. Frederic Henry in A Farewell to Arms is completely disillusioned. He has been to the war, but has seen nothing sacred and glorious. Like Jake Barnes in The Sun Also Rised who hates to talk about the war, Henry is shocked into the realization that “abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene”, and feels “always embarrassed by words such as glory, sacred and sacrifice.” The Hemingway Heroes stand for whole generation. In a word which is essentially chaotic and meaningless, a Hemingway Hero fights a solitary struggle possesses a kind of “despairing courage” as Bertrand Russell terms. It is this courage that enables a man to behave like a man, to assert his dignity in face of adversity.
Psychological Realism
It is the realistic writing that probes deeply into the complexities of characters? thoughts and motivations. Henry James? novel The Ambassadors is considered to be a masterpiece of psychological realism. And Henry James is considered the founder of psychological realism. He believed that reality lies in the impressions made by life on the spectator, and not in any facts of which the spectator is unaware. Such realism is therefore merely the obligation that the artist assumes to represent life as he sees it, which may not be the same life as it “really ” is.
Regionalism
Regionalism manifests a quality in literature, stressing fidelity to a particular geographical section and a faithful representation of its habits, speech, manners, history, folklore, or beliefs. Being a subordinante order of realism, regionalism indicates that an author writes about what is unique in his or her living section. Regionalism can also be viewed as resulted from the desire both to preserve distinctive ways of life before industrialization destroyed them and to come to terms
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with the harsh realities that seemed to replace those early times.
Local Color Fiction
Local color fiction “exploits speech, dress, mannerisms, habits of thought, and topography peculiar to a certain region.
The local color writing was a form of regionalism popular after the Civil War. Local colorism as a trend became dominant in American literature in the late 1860s and early 1870s. The ultimate aim of the local colorists is , as Garland indicates, to create the illusion of an indigenous little world with qualities that tell it apart from the world outside. Their best work not only presents an authentic surface of a particular time and location with speech, dress, and gestures in exact focus, but also goes beyond the surface to the depths that transform the local into the universal. Local color fiction relies on simplicity for its greatest effect. It is characteristic of vernacular language and satirical humor.
Beat Generation
The Beat Generation is a group of American writers and artists popular in the 1950s and early 1960s, influenced by Eastern philosophy and religion (e.g., Zen Buddhism) and known especially for their use of non-traditional forms and their rejection of conventional social values. Central elements of \rejection of materialism, experimentation with drugs and alternate forms of sexuality, and an interest in Eastern religion. The principal works of the movement are considered to be Jack Kerouac's On the Road (1957), Allen Ginsberg's Howl (1956), and William S. Burroughs' Naked Lunch (1959).
Ecofeminism is a social and political movement which attempts to unite environmentalism and feminism, with some currents linking deep ecology and feminism. Ecofeminists argue that a relationship exists between the oppression of women and the degradation of nature, and explore the intersectionality between sexism, the domination of nature, racism, speciesism, and other characteristics of social inequality. Some current work emphasizes that the capitalist and patriarchal system is based on triple domination of the Global South (people who live in the Third World), women, and nature.
comedy is something that is funny. A comedy usually means a play with a light happy story. Tragedy is something that is very bad or sad. In drama, a tragedy is a serious play, often with an unhappy ending and often concerned with important events.
legend : a story, usually handed down from the past. It differs from myths on the basis of the elements of historical truth they contain.
novel : a book- length story whose characters and events are usually imaginary. A writer of novels is a novelist.
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rhyme : standard rhyme consists of the repetition in the rhyming words of the last stressed vowel and of all the speech sounds following that vowel.
simile and metaphor: simile is a way of describing something by saying that it is like something else, using the words “like” or “as”. While metaphor is a way of describing something by saying that it is like something else, without using the words”like” or “as”.
juxtaposition: two words or similar syntactic structures set together in the same sentence.
symbol : literally, it refers to something that stands for something else. In literature, any word, object, action, or character that embodies and evokes a range of additional meaning and significance.
streams of consciousness: it was a phrase used by William James to describe the unbroken flow of perceptions, thoughts, and feelings in the waking mind; it has since been adopted to describe a narrative method in modern fiction.
black humor: baleful, na?ve, or inept characters in a fantastic or nightmarish modern world play out their roles in a “tragic farce” in which the events are often simultaneously comic, horrifying, and absurd.
metaphysical poetry: the poetry show clever tricks of style and unlikely comparisons. In early 17th century in English literature, John Donne and others wrote greatly such poetry.
irony: something that has a second meaning intended by the writer, often the opposite, and often with a bitterly humouous tone.
alliteration: repeating a sound or a letter, especially at the beginning of words, in poetry.
paradox: a statement which seems on its face to be logically contradictory or absurd, yet turns out to be interpretable in a way that makes good sense.
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英美文学名词解释
