美国文学 Literary Terms.doc

Literary Terms （American）TheocracyIt is a state system in which the state and the church are combined into one, with the idea that God would govern through the church. It was the major form of the government in colonial America.PuritanismPuritanism refers to the practices and beliefs of the Puritans. The Puritans are the people who wanted to purify the Church of England and were persecuted in England. The first settlers who became the founding father of the American nation were quite a few of them Puritans. They came to America out of various reasons, but because they were a group of serious and religious people, they carried a code of values, a philosophy of life, a point of view which, in time, took root in the New World, and became what is popularly known as American Puritanism. The American Puritans, like their brothers back in England, were idealists, believing that the church should be restored to the “purity” of the first-century Church. To them religion was a matter of primary importance. They accepted the doctrine of predestination, original sin total depravity and God’s absolute sovereignty, and limited atonement through a special infusion of grace from God. It was this kind of religious belief that they brought with them into the wilderness. There they meant to prove that they were God’s chosen people enjoying His blessings on this earth as in heaven.In the grim struggle for survival that followed immediately after their arrival in America, the character of the people underwent a significant change. They became more practical, as indeed they had to be. gradually a set of Puritan values came into being. They believe in hard working, piety, and sobriety. They accumulated wealth and they regarded every event in daily life significant for the salvation. Their aim is to build a new Garden of Eden on the earth. That was the origin of the “American Dream”. But later Puritanism turned out to arouse sense of disgust because of its religious intolerance.In