54. Modernism（现代主义）：The term modernism is widely used to identify new and distinctive features in the subjects, forms, concepts, and styles of literature and the other arts in the early decades of the 20th century, but especially after WWI. The specific features signified by “modernism” vary with the user, but many critics agree that it involves a deliberate and radical break with some of the traditional bases not only of Western art, but of Western culture in general.
55.Postmodernism（后现代主义）：The term postmodernism is often applied to the literature and art after WWII. Postmodernism involves not only a continuation, sometimes carried to an extreme, of the countertraditional experiments of modernism, but also diverse attempts to break away from modernist forms which had, inevitably, become in their turn conventional, as well as to overthrow the elitism of modernist “high art” by recourse to the models of “mass art”.
56. Theme（主题）：The term is usually applied to a general concept or doctrine, whether implicit or asserted, which an imaginative work is designed to incorporate and make persuasive to the reader.
57. Multiple Point of View （多重视角）：It is one of the literary techniques William Faulkner used, which shows within the same story how the characters reacted differently to the same person or the same situation. The use of this technique gave the story a circular form wherein one event was the center, with various points of view radiating from it. The multiple points of view technique makes the reader recognize the difficulty of arriving at a true judgment.
58. Ode（颂诗）：An ode is a complex and often lengthy lyric poem, written in a dignified formal style on some lofty or serious subject.
59. Magic realism（魔幻现实主义）is a new literary genre appeared in the 20th century. The writers, who employed magic realistic techniques, interweave, in an ever-lasting pattern, a sharply etched realism in representing ordinary events and descriptive details together with fantastic and dreamlike elements, as well as with materials derived from myth and fairy tales. In American literature, some of Toni Morrison’s novels employed magic realistic elements.
60. Transcendentalism（超验主义）：appeared in 1830s in US；emphasis on spirit or oversoul and stressing importance of the individual；regarding nature as symbols of the spirit or God and emphasis on brotherhood of man；representatives: Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau
61. Lost Generation（迷惘的一代）：Many prominent American writers of the decade following the end of WWI, disillusioned by their war experience and alienated by what they perceived as the crassness of American culture are often tagged as Lost Generation. Their representatives are F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway.
62. Naturalism（自然主义）：Naturalism was a new and harsher realism. 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 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 free will, that lives were controlled by heredity and environment, that the destiny of humanity was misery in life and oblivion in death. In American literature, Theodore Dreiser is a representative of naturalism.
63.  American Puritanism（清教主义）：Puritanism is the practices and beliefs of the Puritans. The Puritans were originally members of a division of the Protestant Church. They were a group of serious, religious people, advocating 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 heritage, Puritanism did have a profound influence on the early American mind. American Puritanism also had an enduring influence on American literature.
64. Flashback（闪回）：interpolating narratives or scenes which represent events that happened before the time at which the work opened; for example, it is used in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman.
65. Plot（情节）：The plot in a dramatic or narrative work is constituted by its events and actions, as these are rendered and ordered toward achieving particular artistic and emotional effects