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术语解释
American
Romanticism
The romantic period
stretched from the end of the eighteenth century
through the outbrea
k of the Civil War.
It is a term that is associated with imagination
and boundlessness, as contra
sted
with
classicism, which is commonly associated with
reason and restriction. A romanti
c
attitude
may be detected in literature
of any period, but as an historical movement it
arose i
n the 18th and 19th centuries,
in reaction to more rational literary,
philosophic, artistic, religio
us, and
economic
standards. The most clearly defined
romantic literary movement in the
Transcendenta
ics
frequently
shared
certain
general
characteristics:
moral
enthusiasm,
faith
in
value of
individualism and intuitive perception, and a
presumption that the natural world was
a source of goodness and
man
’
s societies as a source
of corruption.
The representatives of
the early period includes Washington Irving and
James Fenimore
Cooper, and those of the
late period contain Ralph
Waldo
Emerson, Henry
David
Thoreau,
Walt Whitman,
Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Edgar Allan
Poe.
American Realism;
As a literary movement,Realism came in
the latter half of the 19
th
century as a reaction
against the lie
of romanticism and sentimentalism. It 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 common place and the low,
and it offers an objective rather an idealistic
view of
human
nature
and
human
experience.
The
American
realists
advocated
“
verisimilitude
of
detail
derived
from
observation,
”
the
effort
to
approach
the
norm
of
experience
——
a
reliance on the representative in plot,
setting, and character, and to offer an objective
rather
than an idealized view of human
nature and experience. Realists looked for truth
in everyday
truths. Some of the
representatives are William Dean Howells and Henry
James
Enlightenment:
The
American
Enlightenment
is
the
intellectual
thriving
period
in
America
in
the
mid-to-late
18
th
century(1715-1789),especially as it relates to
American Revolution on the one
hand the
the European Enlightenment on the other.
Influenced by the scientific revolution of
the
17
th
century
and
the
humanist
period
during
the
Renaissance,
the
Enlightenment
took
scientific reasoning and applied it to
human nature,society and religion.
Politically,
the
age
is
distinguished
by
an
emphasis
upon
liberty,democracy,
republicanism
and
religious
tolerance--
culminating
in
the
drafting
of
the
United
States
Declaration
of
Independence
and
Constitution.
Attempts
to
reconcile
science
and
religion
resulted
in
a
rejection
of
prophecy,
miracle
and
revealed
religion,
often
in
preference
for
Deism. Historians have considered how
the ideas of John Locke and republicanism merged
to
form
Republicanism
in
the
United
States.
The
most
important
leaders
of
the
American
Enlightenment include Benjamin Franklin
and Thomas Jefferson.