美国文学史复习提纲 名词解释.docVIP

PAGE PAGE 5 I. Explain the following literary terms(名词解释). Romanticism The most profound and comprehensive idea of romanticism is the vision of a greater personal freedom for the individual. Appeals to imagination; Stress on emotion rather than reason; optimism, geniality. Subjectivity: in form and meaning. American transcendentalism American transcendentalism was an important movement in philosophy and literature that flourished during the early to middle years of the nineteenth century (about 1836-1860).?For the transcendentalists, the soul of each individual is identical with the soul of the world and contains what the world contains. Realism: “nothing more and nothing less than the truthful treatment of material.” the Civil war a. verisimilitude of details derived from observation b. representative in plot, setting and character c. an objective rather than an idealized view of human experience or（ American Realism: In American literature, the Civil War brought the Romantic Period to an end. The Age of Realism came into existence. It came as a reaction against the lie of romanticism and sentimentalism. Realism turned from an emphasis on the strange toward a faithful rendering of the ordinary, a slice of life as it is really lived. It expresses the concern for commonplace and the low, and it offers an objective rather than an idealistic view of human nature and human experience.） 4. Modernism like modernism in general is a trend of thought that affirms the power of human beings to create, improve, and reshape their environment, with the aid of scientific knowledge, technology and practical experimentation, and is thus in its essence both \o Social progress progressive and \o Optimism optimistic. The general term covers many political, cultural and artistic movements rooted in the changes in \o Western culture Western society at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century. American modernism is an artistic and cultural moveme