American-Puritanism-美国文学史

American

Puritanism

:

Puritanism

is

the

practices

and

beliefs

of

the

Puritans.

The

Puritans

were originally members of a division of the Protestant Church. The first settlers who became the

founding fathers of the American nation were quite a few of them. They were a group of serious,

religious

people,

advocating

highly

religious

and

moral

principles.

As

the

word

itself

hints,

Puritans

wanted

to

purity

their

religious

beliefs

and

practices.

They

accepted

the

doctrine

of

predestination, original sin and total depravity, and limited atonement through a special infusion of

grace

form

God.

As

a

culture

heritage,

Puritanism

did

have

a

profound

influence

on

the

early

American mind. American Puritanism also had a enduring influence on American literature.

6.

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.

8

American

Transcendentalism:

Transcendentalists

terroras

from

the

romantic

literature

of

Europe.

They

spoke

for

cultural

rejuvenation

and

against

the

materialism

of

Americagogopirit, or the Oversoul, as the most important thing in the Universe. They stressed the

importance of the individual. To them, the individual was the most important element of society.

They offered a fresh perception of nature as symbolic of the Spirit or God. Nature was, to them,

alive, filled with God’s overwhelming presence. Transcen

dentalism is based on the belief that the

most fundamental truths about life and death can be reached only by going beyond the world of

the senses. Emerson’s Nature has been called the “Manifesto of American Transcendentalism” and

his

The

American

Scholar

has

been

rightly

regarded

as

America’s

“Declaration

of

Intellectual

Independence”.

Black humor

, in literature, drama, and film, grotesque or morbid humor used to express

the absurdity, insensitivity, paradox, and cruelty of the modern world. Ordinary characters

or situations are usually exaggerated far beyond the limits of normal satire or irony. Black

humor uses devices often associated with tragedy and is sometimes equated with tragic

farce.

For

example,

Stanley

Kubrick's

film

Dr.

Strangelove;

or,

How

I

Learned

to

Stop

Worrying and Love the Bomb

(1963) is a terrifying comic treatment of the circumstances

surrounding the dropping of an atom bomb, while Jules Feiffer's comedy

Little Murders

(1965) is a delineation of the horrors of modern urban life, focusing particularly on random

assassinations.

The

novels

of

such

writers

as

Kurt

Vonnegut,

Thomas

Pynchon,

John

Barth, Joseph Heller, and Philip Roth contain elements of black humor.

6.

The

Lost

Generation

:

It’s

used

to

describe

the

people

of

the

postwar

year

s.

It

describes the Americans who remained in Paris as a colony of “expatriates” or exiles.

It

describes

the

writers

like

Hemingway

who

lived

in

semipoverty.

It

describes

the

Americans who returned to their native land with an intense awareness of living in an

unfamiliar changing world.

After World War I, the young disappointed American writers, such as Hemingway,

Pound, Cummings Fitzgerald, chose Paris as their place of exile. They came from the

East

or

the

Middle

West

of

the

U.

S.

A,

and

most

of

them

had

been

shocked

or

wounded in the war. An American woman writer named Gertrude Stein, who had lived