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1、1. Allegory: A tale in verse or prose in which characters, actions, or settings represent abstract ideas or moral qualities. An allegory is a story with two meanings, a literal meaning and a symbolic meaning.2. Alliteration: The repetition of the initial consonant sounds in poetry.3. Allusion: A ref
2、erence to a person, a place, an event, or a literary work that a writer expects the reader to recognize and respond to. An allusion may be drawn from history, geography, literature, or religion.4. American Naturalism: American naturalism was a new and harsher realism. American naturalism had been sh
3、aped by the war; by the social upheavals that undermined the comforting faith of an earlier age. Americas literary naturalists dismissed the validity of comforting moral truths. They attempted to achieve extreme objectivity and frankness, presenting characters of low social and economic classes who
4、were determined by their environment and heredity. In presenting the extremes of life, the naturalists sometimes displayed an affinity to the sensationalism of early romanticism, but unlike their romantic predecessors, the naturalists emphasized that the world was amoral, that men and women had no f
5、ree will, that lives were controlled by heredity and environment, that the destiny of humanity was misery in life and oblivion in death. Although naturalist literature described the world with sometimes brutal realism, it sometimes also aimed at bettering the world through social reform.5. American
6、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, advoca
7、ting 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 heri
8、tage, 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
9、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 vi
10、ew of human nature and human experience.7. American Romanticism: The Romantic Period covers the first half of the 19th century. A rising America with its ideals of democracy and equality, its industrialization, its westward expansion, and a variety of foreign influences were among the important fact
11、ors which made literary expansion and expression not only possible but also inevitable in the period immediately following the nations political independence. Yet, romantics frequently shared certain general characteristics: moral enthusiasm, faith in value of individualism and intuitive perception,
12、 and a presumption that the natural world was a source of goodness and mans societies a source of corruption. Romantic values were prominent in American politics, art, and philosophy until the Civil War. The romantic exaltation of the individual suited the nations revolutionary heritage and its fron
13、tier egalitarianism.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 t
14、he 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 Gods overwhelming presence. Transcendentalism is based on the belief that the most fundamental truths
15、about life and death can be reached only by going beyond the world of the senses. Emersons Nature has been called the “Manifesto of American Transcendentalism” and his The American Scholar has been rightly regarded as Americas “Declaration of Intellectual Independence”.9. Analogy: (a figure of speec
16、h) A comparison made between tow things to show the similarities between them. Analogies are often used for illustration or for argument.10. Anapest抑抑扬: Its made up of two unstressed and one stressed syllables, with the two unstressed ones in front.11. Antagonist: A person or force opposing the protagonist in a narrative; a rival of the hero or heroine.12. Antithesis: (a figure of speech) The balancing of two contrasting ideas, words phrases, or sentences. An antith
