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1、Black humor: the term black humor was created in 1920s, but it was not noticed until 1960s. it was particularly a literary phenomenon in America after WW. Black humor, in literature, is drama, novel, and film, grotesque or morbid humor used to express the absurdity, insensitivity, paradox, and cruel
2、ty 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 face. Josegh Heller and Kury Vonnegut are famous for their novels of black hu
3、mor. Especially Hellers Catch22.Imagism: A poetic movement of England and the U.S. that flourished from 1909 to 1917. The movement insists on the creation of images in poetry by “the direct treatment of the thing” and the economy of wording. “poetic techniques to record exactly the momentary impress
4、ions”Three main principles of the Imagist Movement (1912) : 1 direct treatment of poetic subjects 2 elimination of merely ornamental or superfluous words, to use no word that does not contribute to the presentation. 3 rhythmical composition in the sequence of the musical phrase rather than in the se
5、quence of a metronome. 4 pounds In a Station of the Metro is a well-known poem.Local colorism: local colorism is a type of writing that was popular in the late 19th(1860s1870s). The feature of local colorism are: (1) presenting a locale distinguished from the outside world; (2)describing the exotic
6、of the picturesque; (3)glorifying the past; (4) showing things as they are; (5) influence of setting on characters. The well known local colorism authors were Mark Twain with his book Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Bret Hartes with his The Luck of the Roaring Camp.American Purita
7、nism: the settlement of North American continent by English started in the early 17th century. Under siege from church and crown, it sent an offshoot in the third and fourth decades of the seventeenth century to the northern English colonies in the New Worlda migration that laid the foundation for t
8、he religious, intellectual, and social order of New England. Puritanism, however was not only a historically specific phenomenon coincident with the founding of New Zealand; it was also a way of being in the worlda style of response to lived experiencethat has reverberated through American life ever
9、 since. 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.Free verse: free verse is poetry that has an irregular rhythm and line length, and that attempts avoid any predetermined verse
10、structure; instead, it uses the cadenees of natural speech. While it alternates stressed and unstressed syllables as stricter verse forms do, free verse does so in a looser way. Whitemans poetry is an example of free verse at its most impressive, for example Song of Myself. It has since been used Ez
11、ra Pound, T.S. Eliot and other major American poets of the 20th century. Walt Whitemans Leaves of Grass is, perhaps , the most notable example.Lost generation: The lost generation is a term first used by Stein to describe the post-war I generation of American writers: men and women haunted by a sens
12、e of betrayal and emptiness brought about by the destructiveness of the war.2full of youthful idealism, these individuals sought the meaning of life, drank excessively, had love affairs and created some of the finest American literature to date.3the three best-known representatives of lost generatio
13、n are F.Scott Fitzgerald, Hemingway and John dos Passos.Stream of consciousness: in literary criticism, Stream of consciousness denotes a literary technique which seeks to describe an individuals point of view by giving the written equivalent of the characters thought processes. Sense of consciousne
14、ss writing is strongly associated with the modernist movement. Sense of consciousness writing is usually regarded as a special form of interior monologue and is characterized by associative leaps in syntax and punctuation that can make the prose difficult to follow, tracing as they do a characters f
15、ragmentary thoughts and sensory feelings. Sense of consciousness writing gained rapid prominence in the twentieth century. Famous writers to employ this technique in the English language include William Faulkner with his The Sound and the Fury.Theater of the Absurd: this is the kind of theater which
16、 develops from the existentialist philosophy, mainly in Europe. Playwrights: Ionesco, Adamou, Genet, Samuel Beckett, Edward Albee, and Harold Pinter who are founders of the school. Edward Albees Whos Afraid of Virgin Woolf? , The Zoo Story are famous. A form of drama that emphasizes the absurdity of human existence by employing disjointed, repetitious, and meaningless dialogue, purposeless and confusing situations, plots that lack realistic or log
