A movement that originated in Europe but flourished particularly in the United States in the middle of the nineteenth century. At first a religious philosophy emphasizing intuition and individual conscience, transcendentalism was translated into literary terms by the so-called American transcendentalists, a loosely formed group of New England writers and intellectuals that included Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, and Henry David Thoreau.
They hold the conviction that each human being is innately divine that God’s essence lies within all individuals. There are transcendental categories of knowledge (that is, a priori categories that govern our experience and understanding, such as time and causality) by adding other categories of knowledge (such as moral truth) and by contending that individuals have the ability to discover higher truths intuitively or mysteriously, without recourse to the senses or logic. Indeed, transcendentalists suggested that reliance on sensory experience and rational thought may actually impede the acquisition of transcendent truth. People can discover moral truths in nature , the transcendentalists argued, with the guidance of their own conscience rather than dogmatic religious doctrine.
Transcendentalists kicked off the movement in 1836 by forming the Transcendental Club to discuss this “ new thought”, which extolled individual rather than ritualistic spiritual living, the virtues of nature and manual labor, the need for intellectual stimulation. They encourage self-reliance and self-trust .furthermore, the transcendentalists were reformers optimistic about
human potential, allying themselves with such causes as women’s suffrage and abolitionism. Gothic novel:
When applied to literature, Gothic has been used both positively and pejoratively to refer to a genre characterized by a general mood of decay, action that is dramatic and generally violent or otherwise disturbing, loves that are destructively passionate, and settings that are grandiose, if gloomy or bleak. To eighteenth-century neoclassicists, who valued simplicity and unity, the appellation Gothic was synonymous with “barbaric” or crude. For them, Gothic writing was untutored, unrestrained, and ridiculously extravagant, particularly in its reliance on foreign ornament. Romantics, however, found in the Gothic a freedom of spirit, variety, mystery, and instinctual authenticity( as opposed to reasoned and therefore artificial discourse) that meshed well with their own emphasis on individuality, imagination and sublimity.
The Gothic novel arose in late eighteenth-century England and remained popular in the nineteenth century throughout Europe and America; elements of the Gothic novel and Gothic literature in general have persisted up to our own day. The Gothic novel is a romance typically written as a long prose horror narrative that exhibits the Gothic qualities of doom and gloom as well as an emphasis on chivalry and magic. Dark and mysterious medieval castles and chock full of secret passageways and (apparently) supernatural phenomena are common elements used to thrill the reader. Gothic heroes and heroines tend to be equally mysterious, with dark histories and secrets of their own. The Gothic hero is typically a man known more for his power and his charisma than for his personal goodness; the Gothic heroine’s challenge is to win his love without being destroyed in the process. Exaggeration and emotional language are frequently employed by Gothic writers, who typically emphasize storyline and setting over character and characterization. They seek to evoke an atmosphere of terror, often from an unidentified source. The representative writers include Horace Walpole, Ann Radcliffe, the Bronte Sisters, Henry James, Daphne du Maurier, Mary Shelley, Edgar Allan Poe, Stephen King, etc.
American Realism
Realism is the theory of writing in which familiar aspects of contemporary life and everyday scenes are represented in a straightforward of matter-of-fact manner. It stresses truthful treatment of material. It is anti-romantic, anti-sentimental, and without interest in nature, death, etc. writers would describe the charm of human character reacting under various circumstances or authors picture the pioneers of the Far West, the new immigrants, and the struggles of the working classes.
The realists believe that the purpose of art is to produce reality, to establish a literature of realism, to create an objective portrayal of American life. So they depicted life around them, identified their characters with their surroundings, and sometimes achieved psychological penetration. They wrote about individual characters confronted by hardships and moral dilemma. Their writing exposes the values of common humanity. Life appears as it is, not picturesque, adventurous, heroic style characteristic of romantic writers. Realistic writers were also detached observers of life. The narrator in their novels stands back and tries not to let their own emotions gain the way of which their words give the reader. They just present the reader what the characters do instead of telling the reader what it means in their writing.
Regional and Local Color Writings:
They are instances of realism insofar as they depict contemporary life, use the speech of the common people, and avoid, in general, fantastic plotlines. There are also often a romantic flavor in regional and local color writings as they receive influences from Washington Irving and the frontier tradition of tall tales. A regional work relies on the cultural, social and historical settings. If the setting is removed, the work is destroyed. Local color writings are just as dependent upon a specific geographical location, but they give more emphasis to the local details by tapping into its folklore, history, customs, beliefs and speech. Dialect peculiarities are the defining characteristic of local color writing.
Naturalism: is a kind of social Darwinism, which holds that the weak and stupid would fall victim to economic forces. Literary naturalism holds that humans are controlled by laws of heredity and environment, and that the universe is cold and hostile to human desires. American naturalists wrote in a daring, open, and direct manner. The literary naturalists have a major difference from the realists. Though the naturalists describe real life but they do not look at the average, but at the violent, sensational, sordid, unpleasant, and ugly aspects of life. Instead of reflecting the middle-class life, they would rather write about the life of failure, poverty and even crime.
Imagism: It is a Movement in U.S. and English poetry characterized by the use of concrete language and figures of speech, modern subject matter, metrical freedom, and avoidance of romantic or mystical themes, aiming at clarity of expression through the use of precise visual images. It grew out of the Symbolist Movement in 1912 and was initially led by Ezra Pound, Amy Lowell, and others.
Free verse: Free verse refers to a kind of poetry whose rhythmical lines vary in length, adhering to no fixed metrical pattern or the usually rhyming system, such poetry may seem formless, but it does have a form or pattern, often largely based on repetition and parallel structure. Walt
Whitman’s poems are typical example.
International Theme: “The international theme” refers to the moral and psychological complications when the American innocence encountered the European sophistication. It is used by Henry James. The typical Americans in James’ novels: fresh, enthusiastic, eager to learn, and basically “good”, disregard of the conventions, stand for morality. The Europeans in James’ novels : highly cultivated, elegant in manners, but sophisticated. stand for manners.
Psychological Realism:
It focuses on the interior motives, psychological process and characters’ mental narratives instead of simply telling a story. It also focuses on why something happens and not just the scenario that plays out. It emphasizes on the mental process of the characters and often includes their inner thoughts and feelings along with their motives for behavior. Examples of authors are Henry James, Arthur Miller and Fyodor Dostoevsky.
Modernism：A general term applied retrospectively to the wide range of experimental and avant-garde trends in the literature (and other arts) of the early 20th century, including Symbolism, Futurism, Expressionism, Imagism, Vorticism, Dada and Surrealism, along with the innovations of affiliated writers
Modernist literature is characterized chiefly by a rejection of 19th-century traditions and of their consensus between author and reader: the convention of realism, for instance, were abandoned by the Franz Kafka and other novelists, and by expressionist drama, while several poets rejected traditional meters in favor of free verse.
Modernists tended to see themselves as an avant-garde disengaged from bourgeois values, and disturbed their readers by adopting complex and difficult new forms and styles.
In fiction, the accepted continuity of chronological development was upset by Joseph Conrad, Marcel Proust, and William Faulkner, While James Joyce and Virginia Woolf attempted new ways of tracing the flow of characters’ thoughts in their stream-of-consciousness styles.
In poetry, Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot replaced the logical exposition of thoughts with collages of fragmentary images and complex allusions.
Its favored techniques of juxtaposition and multiple points of view challenge the reader to reestablish a coherence of meaning from fragmentary forms.
In English, its major landmarks are Joyce’s Ulysses and Eliot’s The Waste Land (Both 1922). ____Oxford Literary Terms
American modernism like modernism in general is a trend of thought that affirms the power of human beings to create, improve, and reshape their environment, with the aid of scientific knowledge, technology and practical experimentation, and is thus in its essence both progressive and optimistic. The general term covers many political, cultural and artistic movements rooted in the changes in Western society at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century. American modernism is an artistic and cultural movement in the United States starting at the turn of the 20th century with its core period between World War I and World War II and continuing into the 21scentury.
Lost Generation: The term Lost Generation was coined by Gertrude Stein to refer to a group of American literary notables who lived in Paris from the time period which saw the end of World
War I to the beginning of the Great Depression. Significant members included Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound, Sherwood Anderson, T. S. Eliot, and Gertrude herself. Hemingway likely popularized the term, quoting Stein (You are all a lost generation”) as epigraph to his novel, The Sun Also Rises. More generally, the term is being used for the young adults of Europe and America during World War I. They were “lost “ because after the war many of them were disillusioned with the world in general and unwilling to move into a settled life.
The first Post-war era writers self-consciously acknowledged the devoid of faith and alienated from a civilization.
The Jazz Age: The Jazz Age describes the period of the 1920s and 1930s, the years between WWI and WWII, particularly in North America; with the rise of the Great Depression, the values of this age saw much decline. Perhaps the most representative literary work of the age is American writer F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, highlighting what some describe as the decadence and hedonism, as well as the growth of individualism. Fitzgerald is largely credited with coining the term “The Jazz Age .”
Harlem Renaissance: A notable phase of black American writing centered in Harlem ( a predominantly black area of New York City) in the 1920s. Announced by Alain Locke’s anthology The New Negro ( 1925), the movement included the poets Langston Hughes, Jean Toomer, Countee Cullen, and Claude Mckay, continuing into the 1930s with novels of Zora Neale Hurston and Arna Bontemps. It brought a new self-awareness and critical respect to black literature in the United States
____Oxford Literary Terms
A burst of literary achievement in the 1920s by Negro playwrights, poets, novelists who presented new insight into American experience and prepared the way for the emergence of numerous black writers after mid-century.
Imagism:
Imagism is a movement in early 20th-century Anglo-American poetry that favored precision of imagery, and clear, sharp language. The imagists rejected the sentiment and artifice typical of much Romantic and Victorian poetry.
Imagism called for a return to what were seen as more classical values, such as directness of presentation, and economy of language, as well as a willingness to experiment with non-traditional verse forms.
The literary movement Imagism was begun by Ezra Pound and a few friends who wanted to rid poetry of the “bad habits” that they felt 19-th century poets had fallen into: the use of too many words; the use of words no longer in actual speech; repetitious subject matter; and the use of tired poetic patterns, especially traditional stanzas and meters. The imagists wanted “direct treatment of the thing” and a rhythm like that of a musical phrase.
American Dream: The term was first used by James Truslow Adams in his book The Epic of America which was written in 1931. He states: \"The American Dream is that dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement. … It is not a dream of motor cars and high wages merely, but
a dream of social order in which each man and each woman shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable, and be recognized by others for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position.\"
Sigmund Freud and the Science of Psychology: Freud’s naming of the “Unconscious” supplied a focus for a variety of intuitions in the later part of the 19th –century to the effect that the psyche contains an unwitting domain by which the patterns of past experience, both personal and racial, affect involuntarily the conscious self. This “psychic determinism” of Freud’s issued a challenge to those assumptions of individual choice, the self’s capacity to choose its own fate and even reinvent itself, that are situated at the heart of the American Dream. In some degree, Freud opened the door to the freeing of language from the normal demands of logical progression as they are embodied in the syntactic conventions, and to the development of forms, patterns of nuance and suggestion, that could accommodate the multiple activities of the human mind.
Hemingway's Iceberg Theory: “The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water.”
According to Hemingway, \"If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water.\"
Hemingway's theory of omission is widely referred to as the \"iceberg principle.\" He explains this principle in chapter 16 of his 1932 book, Death in the Afternoon. Essentially, the principle states that by omitting certain parts of a story, a writer actually strengthens that story. The writer must be conscious of these omissions and be writing true enough in order for the reader to sense the omitted parts. When the reader senses the omitted parts, a greater perception and understanding for the story can be achieved.
Free verse: Free verse refers to a kind of poetry whose rhythmical lines vary in length, adhering to no fixed metrical pattern or the usually rhyming system, such poetry may seem formless, but it does have a form or pattern, often largely based on repetition and parallel structure. Walt Whitman’s poems are typical example.
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