1. Transcendentalism:
Transcendentalism is a philosophical and literary movement. It exalted feeling over reason, individual expression over the restraints of law and custom. It expressed a new outlook or new ideas on life. It believed individualism, human beings’ divinity, nature, spiritual life, dignity of manual labor, self-trust/ self-reliance, democracy. (Emerson, Henry David Thoreau)
2． Free verse:
\"free verse,\" that is, poetry without a fixed beat or regular rhyme scheme. A looser and more open-ended syntactical structure is frequently favored. Lines and sentences of different lengths are left lying side by side just as things are, undisturbed and separate. There are few compound sentences to draw objects and experiences into a system of hierarchy.
3. The Lost Generation:
It refers to, in general, the post-World WarⅠgeneration, but specifically a group of expatriate disillusioned intellectuals and artists, who experimented on new modes of thought and expression by rebelling against former ideals and values and replacing them only by despair or a cynical hedonism. (Hemingway, Ezra Pound/ The Sun Also Rises)
4. Local Colorism:
“ Local colorism” is a unique variation of American literary realism. Generally, the works by local colorists are concerned with the life of a small, well--defined region or province. They worked from personal experience; they recorded the facts of a unique environment and suggested that the native life was shaped by the curious conditions of the loca1e. (Writers whose works are characterized with local colors are Mark Twain, Sarah Orne Jewett, Joseph Kirkland and Hamlin Garland.)
5. The Hemingway Code Hero:
It refers to some protagonists in Hemingway's works. To behave well in the lonely, losing battle with life is to show \"grace under pressure\" and constitutes in itself a kind of victory, a theme clearly established in The Old Man and The Sea. Though life is but a losing battle, it is a struggle man can dominate in such a way that loss becomes dignity; man can be physical1y destroyed but never defeated spiritually.
6. Iceberg theory:
\"The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water.” Seemingly simple and natural, Hemingway's style is actually polished and tightly contro1led, but highly suggestive and connotative. While rendering vividly the outward physical events and sensations Hemingway expresses the meaning of the story and conveys the complex emotions of his characters with a considerable range and astonishing intensity of feeling. (Less is more.)
7. Prose epic:
Moby-dick is regarded as the Great American Novel, the first American prose epic(散文史诗： a long narrative poem telling of heroic deeds of reflecting the values of the society from which it originated), though it is presented in the form of a novel.
