美国文学_英语术语解释.docVIP

Lost Generation（迷惘的一代） This terms has been used again and again to describe the people of the postwar years. It describes the Americans who remained in Paris as a colony of “expatriates” or exiles. It describes the writers like Hemingway who lived in semi-poverty. It describes the Americans who returned to their native land with an intense awareness of living in an unfamiliar changing world. After World War I, 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, who had lived in Paris since 1903, welcomed these young writers to her apartment which was already famous as a literary salon. She 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. American Realism（现实主义时期 1865-1918） The Background of American Realism The fifty years between the end of the Civil War to the outbreak of the First World War Changes in every aspect of American life Industrialization and the urbanization, “The Gilded Age” Tired of sentimental feelings of Romanticism Interest in reality of life 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