美国文学史名词解释.docxVIP

Modernism: a general term applied retrospectively to the wide range of experimental and avant-garde trends in the literature and other arts of the early 20th century, including symbolism, futurism, expressionism, imagism, Dada, and surrealism, along with the innovations of related writers. Modernist literature is characterized chiefly by a rejection of 19th-century traditions. Modernist writers tended to see themselves as an avant-garde departed with bourgeois values, and disturbed their readers by adopting complex and difficult new forms and styles.Modernist writers often write with an awareness of new anthropological and psychological theories. Mark Twain: follow realism. pseudonym of Samuel Langhorne Clemens American humorist, writer, and lecturer who won a worldwide audience for his stories of youthful adventures, especially The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), Life on the Mississippi (1883), and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884). Writing in American colloquialism and subjects with humors and satires, Mark Twain shed great influence upon later writers such as Sherwood Anderson, Earnest Hemingway and Faulkner. Major works: Naturalism: American naturalism was a new and harsher realism. American naturalism had been shaped by the war; by the social upheavals 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 sth brutal realism, it sometimes also aimed at bettering the world through social reform. Stephen Crane 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 any