美国文学选读名词 解释.docVIP

PAGE 1 PAGE 15 1.Puritanism（清教主义）: Puritanism is the practices and beliefs of the Puritans. ) simply speaking , American Puritanism just refers to the spirit and ideal of puritans,who settled in the North American continent in the early part of the seventeenth century because of religious persecutions. )In content it means scrupulous ,moral rigor ,eapecially hostility to social pleasure and religion . )with time passing it became a dominant factor in American life , one of the most enduring shaping influences in American thought and literature .to some extentit is a state of mind , a part of the national cultural atmosphere that the American breathes ,rather than a set of tenets. ）Actually it is a code of values , a philosophy of life and a point of view in American minds , also a two-faceted tradition of religious idealism and level -headed in common sense . 5）Major topic:American Puritanism Introduction There were no written literature among the more than 500 different Indian languages and tribal cultures，American writing began with the work of English adventurers and colonists in the New World chiefly for the benefit of readers in the mother country. Therefore the writing in this period was essentially two kinds: （1）practical matter-of-fact accounts of farming, hunting, travel, etc. designed to inform people “at home” what life was like in the new world, and, often, to induce their immigration; (2) highly theoretical, generally polemical(好辩的）, discussions of religious questions. 2.The American Romanticism(浪漫主义) I. What is Romanticism a literary movement flourished as a cultural force the early period and the late period. associated with imagination and boundlessness, as an historical movement it arose in the 18th and 19th centuries. The most clearly defined romantic literary movement in the U. S.A was Transcendentalism. Washington Irving and James Fenimore Cooper, and those of the late period contain Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman