1、 英美文学重点名词解释 精品文档 local colorism is an unique variation of American literary realism. Generally, the works by local colorism are concerned with the life of a small region or province. This kind of fiction depicts the characters from a specific setting or of an era, which are marked by its
2、customs, dialects, landscape, or other peculiarities that have escaped standardizing cultural influence. Tasks of local colorism is to wirte or present local characters of their regions in truthful depicton distinguished from others, usually a very small part of the world. local colorism concern
3、ed themselves with presenting and interpreting the local character of their regions. they tended to idealize and glorify, but they never forget to keep an eye on the truthful color of local life. Their truthful depiction of the common people in their commonplace lives added strength to the fight for
4、 realism. Mark Twain's the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is the most representive one uncertainty: 1. distorted time2.the characters' uncertainty about Godot's coming3.changeable about everything4.uncertainty of Godot5.uncertainty of other characters6.uncertainty about the play's theme the
5、only certain thing-----waiting 1. the Lost Generaion The term of "lost generation" was first used by Gertrude Stern(1874--1946), one of the leaders of this group. It include the young English and American expatriates as well as men and women caught in the First World War and cut off from the
6、old values and yet unable to come to terms with the new era when civilization had gone mad. It means this generation had lost the beautiful sense of the calm idylic past. Stein's comment suggests the ambiguous and pointless lives of expatriates as they aimlessly wandered about the continent, drinkin
7、g, making love, and traveling from place to place and from party to party. These activities seem to justify their search for new meaings to replace the old ones. Yet in fact, being cut off from their past, disillusioned in reality, and without a meaningful future to fall on, they were lost in disill
8、usionment and existential voids. They indulged in hedonism in order to make their lives less unberable. 2. the Beat Generation The beat genertion is a literary school which emerged after the Second World War. In the 1950s, there was a widespread discontent among the postwar generation, whose vo
9、ice was one of protest against all the mainstream culture that America represented, including sex, religion and American value system. It reveals spiritual pain and despair resulted from American industrilization and modern civilization. 3. Confessional Poetry/School Confessional poetry is the
10、poetry of the personal or "I". This style of writing emerged in the late 1950s and early 1960s and is associated with poets such as Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton. Lowell's book Life Studies was a highly personal account of his life and familial ties, and had a significant impact on Ame
11、rican poety. Plath and Sexton were both students of Lowell and noted that his work influenced their own writing. The confessional poetry of the mid-twentieth centruy dealt with subject matter that previously had not been open discussed in Amercian poetry. Private experiences with and feelings about
12、death, trauma, depression and relationships were adressed in this type of poetry, often in an autobiographical manner. 4. Black Humor As a genre, black humor is valued in America in the 1960s. Everyone would have a good laugh if they care to read the book through. The laughter is ,however, inev
13、itably followed by the acute awareness that it is based on the suffering and misfortunes of their fellow creature. This is what meant by black humor. The features of black humor are as follows: 1) tragic content is reflected in the form of comedy. 2) it aims at exposing people's oppression by the absurd soceity.( it reveals absurdity and darkness of society.) 3) its characters are anti-heroic 4)its narrative technique is non-logical 收集于网络,如有侵权请联系管理员删除






