Colonial Period:

1. American Puritanism

it comes from the American puritans, who were the first immigrants moved to American continent in the 17th century. Original sin, predestination（预言） and salvation（拯救） were the basic ideas of American Puritanism. And, hard-working, piousness（虔诚,尽职）， thrift and sobriety（清醒） were praised.

Romanticism Period:

2. Romanticism: the literature term was first applied to the writers of the 18thcentury in Europe who broke away from the formal rules of classical writing. When it was used in American literature it referred to the writers of the middle of the 19thcentury who stimulated（刺激） the sentimental emotions of their readers. They wrote of the mysterious of life, love, birth and death. The Romantic writers expressed themselves freely and without restraint. They wrote all kinds of materials, poetry, essays, plays, fictions, history, works of travel, and biography.

3. Gothic tradition (哥特传统): Gothic novel or Gothic romance is a story of terror and suspense, usually set in a gloomy old castle or monastery. In an extended sense, many novels do not have a medievalized setting, but which share a comparably sinister, grotesque, or claustrophobic atmosphere have been classed as Gothic. It contributed to the new emotional climate of Romanticism.

4. Transcendentalism (先验说,超越论): is a philosophic and literary movement that flourished in New England, particular at Concord, as a reaction against Rationalism and Calvinism (理性主义and喀尔文主义). Mainly it stressed intuitive understanding of God, without the help of the church, and advocated independence of the mind. The representative writers are Emerson and Thoreau.

5. Stream of consciousness（意识流）： It is one of the modern literary techniques. It is the style of writing that attempts to imitate the natural flow of a character’s thoughts, feelings, reflections, memories, and mental images as the character experiences them. It was first used in 1922 by the Irish novelist James Joyce. Those novels broke through the bounds of time and space, and depicted vividly and skillfully the unconscious activity of the mind fast changing and flowing incessantly。

6. American Renaissance: American Renaissance sometimes is given to a flourishing of distinctively American literature in the period before the Civil War. This renaissance is represented by the work of Ralph Waldo Emerson, H.D. Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and Walt Whitman. Its major works are Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter(《红字》), Melville’s Moby Dick(《白鲸》), and Whitman’s Leaves of Grass(《草叶集》). The American Renaissance may be regarded as a delayed manifestation of Romanticism, especially in European’s philosophy of Transcendentalism.

7. American Enlightenment 美国启蒙运动：Enlightenment is a philosophical movement of the 18th century that emphasized the use of reason to scrutinize previously accepted doctrines and traditions and that brought about many humanitarian reforms. The American Enlightenment is a term sometimes employed to describe the intellectual culture of the British North American colonies and the early United States. It is commonly dated from 1750-1820. Among the leading intellectual figures of this period are Thomas Jefferson and James Madison.

8. Free Verse自由体诗歌: Free verse is a form of poetry that does not use consistent meter patterns, rhyme, or any other musical pattern. It thus tends to follow the rhythm of natural speech.

Realism Period:

9. The Gilded Age: it was coined by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner in their 1873 book. The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today. In American history, the Gilded Age refers to substantial growth in population in the United States and extravagant displays of wealth and excess of America’s upper-class during the post-Civil War and post-Reconstruction era, in the late 19th century.

10. Psychological Realism心里现实主义: Psychological Realism is a genre which places more than the usual amount of emphasis on interior characterization, and on the motives, circumstances and internal action which springs from and develops external action. The psychological realism is not content to state what happens but goes on to explain the motivation of this action. This type of writing character and characterization are more than usually important, and they often delve deeper in to the mind of a character than novels of other genres.

11. Local Colorism: as a trend became dominant in American literature in the 1860s and early 1870s，it is defined by Hamlin Garland as having such quality of texture and background that it could not have been written in any other place or by anyone else than a native stories of local colorism have a quality of circumstantial(详细的) authenticity(确实性), as local colorists tried to immortalize(使不朽) the distinctive natural, social and linguistic features. It is characteristic of vernacular(本国语) language and satirical(讽刺的) humor

12. American 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. 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 commonplace and the low, and it offers an objective rather than an idealistic view of human nature and human experience

13. Naturalism: American naturalism was a new and harsher realism. American naturalism had been shaped by the war; by the social upheavals（剧变） that undermined the comforting faith of an earlier age. America’s literary naturalists dismissed the validity of comforting moral truths. They attempted to achieve extreme objectivity and frankness, presenting characters of low social and economic classes who were determined by their environment and heredity. Although naturalist literature described the world with sometimes brutal realism, it sometimes also aimed at bettering the world through social reform.

Modernism Period:

14. 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.

15. Modernism(现代主义): It was a complex and diverse (复杂多样的) international movement in all the creative arts (创造性艺术), originating about the end of the 19th century. It provided （出现）the greatest creative renaissance of the 20th century. It was made up of many facets (方面), such as symbolism， surrealism (超现实主义), cubism (立体主义), expressionism, futurism (未来主义), ect

16. The Lost generation: it refers to a group of young intellectuals (知识分子) who came back from war, were injured (受伤害) both physically (身体上) and mentally (精神上). They lived by indulging (放任) themselves in the Bohemian (波西米亚) way of life. Their American dream was disillusioned (破灭了). The best representative of the lost generation was Ernest Hemingway.

17. The Jazz Age: The novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald coined the term “Jazz Age” retrospectively to refer to the decade after World War I and before the stock market crash in 1929, during which Americans embarked upon what he called “the gaudiest spree in history”. Jazz Age is inextricably associated with the wealthy white “flappers” and socialites immortalized in Fitzgerald’s fiction.

18. American Dream: American dream means the belief that everyone can succeed as long as he/she works hard enough. It usually implies a successful and satisfying life. It usually framed in terms of American capitalism（资本主义）, its associated purported meritocracy,（知识界精华） and the freedoms guaranteed by the U.S. Bill of Rights.

19. The Harlem Renaissance哈雷姆文艺复兴：Refers to the flowering of African American literature, art, and drama during the 1920s and 1930s. Though centered in Harlem, New York, the movement impacted urban centers throughout the United States. Black novelists, poets, painters, and playwrights began creating works rooted in their own culture instead of imitating the styles of Europeans and white Americans.

20. The New Criticism新批评主义: The New Criticism as a school of poetry and criticism established itself in the 1940s as an academic orthodoxy in the United States. It is still very much in evidence today as an influence in the literary world and in college classroom instruction. The school had its beginning in the 1920s, took over 20 years to win acceptance and some dominance in poetry writing and criticism in the 1930s and 1940s, and arouse rebellion in the 1950s and 1960s when it gradually ceased to be a school. To sum sup, as a school of formalist criticism, the New Criticism has been noted for its salient features. One of these is its focus on the analysis of the text rather paying attention to external elements such as its social background, its author’s intention and political attitude and its impact on society.

An Overview of American Literature

1. Colonial period (early 17th—late 18th)

2. Romantic period (first half of 19th)

3. Realism (after 1865)

4. Naturalism (last decade of the 19th )

5. Modernism (the first half of the 20th)

美国文学史及选读的名词解释（全）(2)