文学史 名词解释

2、American Dream：From their first settlement on the New continent, Americans dreamed to build their own paradise in the wilderness, believing they could make individual success by self-reliance. Franklin’s success set them an good example and fulfilled their dream, which was characterized by self-reliance, faith in the progress of society and the ideals of the future, practical and optimistic attitude toward life, and final success.

3、Transcendentalism ：Transcendentalism is idealism. (Emerson) Appeared in 1830, marked the maturity of American romanticism and the first renaissance in the American literary history.The term was derived from the Latin verb transcendere: to rise above , to pass beyond the limits.Rise of Transcendentalism: the product of combination of foreign influence (German idealistic philosopher, neo-Platonism, Oriental mysticism, Confucius and Mencius) and American native Puritan tradition.

4、Frontier Humor：It is literature that was generated by the westward expansion in the late 18th and the early 19th centuries. The sense of fun, exaggeration, individuality, and irreverence for traditional Eastern values in frontier humor reflect the optimistic spirit of pre-Civil War America. Frontier humor appears mainly in tall tales of exaggerated feats of strength, rough practical jokes (especially

on sophisticated Easterners), and tales of encounters with wild animals. These tales are filled with rough, homely wisdom.

5、Midwestern Realism：It just refers to William Dean Howells’s realism because he came from the American Midwest and carefully interweaved the life and emotions of ordinary middle-class there in his works. Also because he was the champion of realism, having helped to publish many realistic local color writings by Bret Harte, Mark Twain, George Washington Cable, and others.

6、Cosmopolitan Novels：Henry James’s fame rested largely upon the 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 there from. So he was called the cosmopolitan novelist.

7、Local Colorism：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. 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.

8、Twain’s Humor： Tall-tale: a type of frontier anecdote characterized by exaggeration or understatement with realistic details of character or local customs that work toward a humorous effect: connected with local colorism.

9、The Lost Generation：It is a term in frequent use after WWI in reference to the

young men who survived physically but were afterwards spiritually and morally adrift. So the lost generation refers to disillusioned writers who wrote after WWI. Many of them went to the battle. After the war, they rebelled against former ideals and values and can’t find new ones to replace.It first coined by Gertrude Stein.

10、Code Hero：He defined the Code Hero as \"a man who lives correctly, following the ideals of honor, courage and endurance in a world that is sometimes chaotic, often stressful, and always painful.\" The Code Hero measures himself by how well they handle the difficult situations that life throws at him. In the end the Code Hero will lose because we are all mortals, but the true measure is how a person faces death. The Code Hero believes in \"Nada,\" a Spanish word meaning nothing. There is no afterlife.

11、Image：An image is defined by Pound as that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time, “a vortex(漩涡) or cluster of fused ideas” “endowed with energy”.The exact word must bring the effect of the object before the reader as it had presented itself to the poet’s mind at the time of writing.

12、Black Humour：Reached its peak in the 1960s and declined in the 1970s.

A kind of humor in which disturbing or sinister subjects such as death, disease, or warfare, are treated with bitter amusement, usually in a manner calculated to offend and shock.

13、Metafiction：Fiction that deals, often playfully and self-referentially, with the writing of fiction or its conventions. It is primarily associated with Modernist

literature and Postmodernist literature, but is found at least as early as Homer’s Odyssey and Chaucer’s 14th century Canterbury Tales.

14、Minimalism：Minimalism describes movements in various forms of art and design, especially visual art and music, where the work is set out to expose the essence or identity of a subject through eliminating all non-essential forms, features or concepts. Minimalism is any design or style in which the simplest and fewest elements are used to create the maximum effect.

15、Avant-pop Art：An artistic genre based on the combination of avant-garde and pop art, inheriting the spirit of rebellion, radicalism, subversion and innovation of avant-garde while taking various forms of pop culture as its nutrition and objects of expression.

16、Beat Generation：A group of American poets and novelists who were active and influential in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The young men who grew up during the Second World War thought that American society was full of corruption, selfishness, hypocrisy, commercialization. These young people seemed interested in nothing. It seems that these young people enjoy life to their hearty, spiritually they have nothing. They drank, took drugs, believed oriental Buddhism.

17、The Confessional School：A ruthless, excruciating self-analysis of one’s own background and heritage, one’s own most private desires and fantasies etc., and the urgent “I’ll-tell-it-all-to-you” impulse.

18、The Black Mountain poets：The Black Mountain poets, sometimes called projectivist poets, were a group of mid 20th century American avant-garde or

postmodern poets centered on Black Mountain College.

19、Schlimazel or Schlemiel：It means a person whose luck is always bad. Things always go wrong for him. The schlemiel is always outwitted. Yet he is able to laugh at himself. Humor is an important purpose for the portrayal of such a character. He is a wise fool. The schlemiel brings out an important theme in Jewish literature, the importance of humility. One has to learn to be humble and thankful for what one gets in life.