美国文学术语

1. Realism

In American literature, the Civil War brought the Romantic Period to an end. The Age of Realism came into existence. It came as a reaction against the lie of romanticism and sentimentalism, as Everett Carter put it. Realism turned from an emphasis on the strange toward a faithful rendering of the ordinary, a slice of life as it is really lived. It expresses the concern for common place and the low, and it offers an objective rather than an idealistic view of human nature and human experience. Realist literature finds the drama and the tension beneath the ordinary surface of life. A realist writer is more objective than subjective, more descriptive than symbolic. Realists looked for truth in everyday truths. The representative writers are William Dean Howells, Mark Twain and Henry James.

2. Free verse

Free verse is poetry that has an irregular rhythm and line length and that attempts to avoid any predetermined verse structure. It is poetry without a fixed metrical pattern, having a loosely organized rhythm. It uses the cadences of natural speech. Although free verse had been used before Whitman—notably in Italian opera and in the King James translation of the Bible—it was Whitman who pioneered the form and made it acceptable in American poetry. It is to be found in the work of some 19th-century American poets, e.g. Whitman and Stephen Crane, and it has been commonly employed only since World War I, its early users including the Imagists, Sandburg, Masters, Pound and E.E. Cummings.

3. Romanticism

The Romantic Period stretches from the end of the 18th century till the outbreak of the Civil War. A rising America with its ideals of democracy and equality, its industrialization, its westward expansion, and a variety of foreign influences such as Sir Walter Scott were among the important factors which made literary expansion and expression not only possible but also inevitable in the period immediately following the nation's political independence. Yet, 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 goodness and man's societies a source of corruption. Romantic writers include Washington Irving, James Fennimore Cooper, Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne and Melville, etc.

4. Imagism

Imagism is a poetic movement in England and the US, flourished from 1909-1917. Originating in the aesthetic philosophy of T. E. Hulme, the movement soon attracted Ezra Pound. It includes the use of language of common speech, precision, the creation of new rhythms, absolute freedom in choice of subject matter, the evocation of images in hard, clear poetry and concentration.

5. Naturalism

American realism developed into naturalism at the end of the 19th century. Naturalists attempted to achieve extreme objectivity and frankness and emphasized the helpless brutal struggle of the low social and economic classes for survival in a cold world full of crushing forces of environment and heredity. It is a literary movement that began in France in the middle of the 19th century. It shares the features such as describing reality objectively, showing gloomy and dark picture, fighting against the creation of representative characters, etc. In conclusion, naturalism is the product of Darwinism and Determinism and Marxism. It is a creative term applied to the literature that aims at the detached scientific and objectivity in the treatment of natural man.

6. The Lost Generation

This term has been used again and again to describe the people of the postwar years. After World War 1, the young disappointed American writers, such as Hemingway, Pound, Cummings, F. Scott Fitzgerald, chose Paris as their place of exile. They came from the East or the Middle West of the U. S. A, and most of them had been shocked or wounded in the war. An American woman writer named Gertrude Stein called them "the Lost Generation" , because they had cut themselves off from their past in

America in order to create new types of writing which had never been tried before. "The Lost Generation" is also painted in the writers' writings. The young English and American expatriates, men and women, were 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. They wandered pointlessly and restlessly, enjoying things like fishing, swimming, bullfight and beauties of nature, but they were aware all the while that the world is crazy and meaningless and futile. Their whole life is undercut and defeated.

7. New England Transcendentalism

American Romanticism cultivates around the 1840s in what has been known as New England Transcendentalism. The Transcendentalists place emphasis on spirit, or the over soul; they stress the importance of the individual; they offer a fresh perception of nature as the symbol of the spirit or God; New England Transcendentalism is the product of a combination of foreign influence and native American Puritan tradition. It is a philosophical and literary movement. The representatives of Transcendentalism are Emerson and Thoreau, whose masterpiece are respectively “On Nature” and “Walden”.

8. Local Colorism

It first makes its presence felt in late 1860s and early 70s. It stresses the realistic presentation of the local characters with their regional qualities such as dialects and customs. It has such quality of texture and background that it cannot have been written in any other place or by anyone else than a native. It breaks the dominance of East in culture and literature. The representative of Local Colorism is Mark Twain, whose masterpiece includes Life on Mississippi, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, etc.