美国文学考试范围整理参考1.docVIP

Autobiography Autobiography is a branch of literature which is an account of a person’s life. The essential difference between a novel and autobiography is this: The novel ‘uses’ real experience as the raw material for fiction by inventing plots and characters. Autobiography simply presents with a more elegant and formally ordered version of the writer’s experiences and memories. Legend Legend, a story or group of stories handed down through popular oral tradition, usually consisting of an exaggerated or unreliable account of some actually or possibly historical person —often a saint, monarch, or popular hero. Legends are sometimes distinguished from myths in that they concern human beings rather than gods, and sometimes in that they have some sort of historical basis whereas myths do not; but these distinctions are difficult to maintain consistently. The term was originally applied to accounts of saints lives, but is now applied chiefly to fanciful tales of warriors, criminals, and other sinners; or more recently to those bodies of biographical rumor and embroidered anecdote surrounding dead film stars and rock musicians. Gothic romance A type of novel that flourished in the late 18th and early 19th century in England. Gothic romances were mysteries, often involving the supernatural and heavily tinged with horror, and they were usually set against dark backgrounds of medieval ruins and haunted castles. Seemingly modeled on Charlotte Bront?s Jane Eyre and Daphne du Mauriers Rebecca, these novels usually concern spirited young women, either governesses or new brides, who go to live in large gloomy mansions populated by peculiar servants and precocious children and presided over by darkly handsome men with mysterious pasts. Transcendentalism Transcendentalism is the summit of the Romantic Movement in the history of American literature in the 19th century. Transcendentalism has been defined philosophically as “the recognition（认知） in man of the capacity of knowing t