《英美文学史》名词解释.docx

英美文学史名词解释 1. English Critical Realism English critical realism of the 19th century flourished in the forties and in the early fifties. The realists first and foremost criticized the capitalist society from a democratic viewpoint and delineated (portrayed) the crying (extremely shocking) contradictions of bourgeois reality. The greatness of the English realists lies not only in their satirical portrayal of bourgeoisie and in the exposure of the greed and hypocrisy of the ruling classes, but also in their sympathy for the laboring people. Humor and satire are used to expose and criticize the seamy (dark) side of reality. The major contribution of the critical realists lies in their perfection of the novel. Charles Dickens and William Makepeace Thackeray are the most important representative of English critical realism. 2. The "Stream of Consciousness" The "stream of consciousness" is a psychological term indicating "the flux of conscious and subconscious thoughts and impressions moving in the mind at any given time independently of the person's will." In late 19th century, the literary device of "interior monologue" was originated in France as an application of modern psychological knowledge to literary creations. In the 20th century, under the influence of Freud 's theory of psychological analysis, a number of writers adopted the "stream of consciousness" method of novel writing. The striking feature of these novelists is their giving precedence to the depiction of the characters' mental and emotional reactions to external events, rather than the events themselves. In doing so, the novelists abandoned the conventional usages of realistic plot structure, characterization and description, and their works became successions of "fleeting images of the external world mingled with thoughts and half-thoughts and shadows of thought attached to the immediate present or moving back and forth in memory." James Joyce and Virginia Woolf are the two best known novelists of the "s