reviewofamericanliterature全.doc

Definition 1 Romanticism: In literature, Romanticism found recurrent themes in the evocation or criticism of the past, the cult of sensibility with its emphasis on women and children, the heroic isolation of the artist or narrator, and respect for a new, wilder, untrammeled and pure nature. 2 Realism：In the spirit of general realism, Realist authors opted for depictions of everyday and banal activities and experiences, instead of a romanticized or similarly stylized presentation.Realism?in literature is an approach that attempts to describe life without idealization or romantic subjectivity. Although realism is not limited to any one century or group of writers, it is most often associated with the literary movement in 19th-century France, specifically with the French novelists Flaubert and Balzac. It tends to represent objects, actions, or social conditions as they actually are, without idealization or presentation in abstract form. 3 Naturalism：Naturalism was a literary movement taking place from 1880s to 1940s that used detailed realism to suggest that social conditions, heredity, and environment had inescapable force in shaping human character. It was depicted as a literary movement that seeks to replicate a believable everyday reality, as opposed to such movements as Romanticism or Surrealism, in which subjects may receive highly symbolic, idealistic, or even supernatural treatment. Naturalism is the outgrowth of Realism, a prominent literary movement in mid-19th-century France and elsewhere. Naturalist fiction in the United States was often concentrated on the non-Anglo, ethnically marked inhabitants of the growing American cities, many of them immigrants and most belonging to a class-spectrum ranging from the destitute to the lower middle-class. The naturalists were not the first to concentrate on the industrialized American city, but they were significant in that they believed that the realist tools refined in the 1870s and 1880s were inadequate to represen