List of terms Оглавление

Canon 1

Foundation texts 1

Yankee 1

Yankee Doodle 2

Puritanism + Manifest Destiny 2

New England 5

Frontier 5

American Adam 6

Captivity narratives 9

Expansion 10

Regionalism 11

Slave narrative 12

Transcendentalism 13

Abolitionism 16

American South 16

Wild West 16

Western 17

Guilded Age 19

Tall tale 21

Yarn 22

Spirituals 23

Realism vs Naturalism 24

Reconstruction 26

Modernism 27

Lost generation 29

Southern Renaissance 30

Beatnicks, Beat Generation 32

Mass literature, pop literature 34

Canon

Canon, a body of writings recognized by authority. Those books of Holy Scripture which religious leaders accept as genuine are canonical, as are those works of a literary author which scholars regard as authentic. The canon of a national literature is a body of writings especially approved by critics or anthologists and deemed suitable for academic study. Canonicity is the quality of being canonical.

1. a standard, rule, or principle, or set of these, that are believed by a group of people to be right and good

2. a) list of books or pieces of music that are officially recognized as being the work of a certain writer: the Shakespearean canon

b) all the books that are recognized as being the most important pieces of literature: the literary canon

Foundation texts

The foundation texts - texts-sources of information about something. Usually writers or historians refer to foundation texts as prooflinks. For example, the Bible, May Flower Convenant, John Smith's diary.

If nobody before wrote anything about a topic, then the first text about the topic would be a foundation text.

Yankee

American Heritage Dictionary

1. A native or inhabitant of New England.

2. A native or inhabitant of a northern U.S. state, especially a Union soldier during the Civil War.

3. A native or inhabitant of the United States.

[Probably from Dutch Janke, nickname of Jan, John.]

WORD HISTORY   The origin of Yankee has been the subject of much debate, but the most likely source is the Dutch name Janke, meaning "little Jan" or "little John," a nickname that dates back to the 1680s. Perhaps because it was used as the name of pirates, the name Yankee came to be used as a term of contempt. It was used this way in the 1750s by General James Wolfe, the British general who secured British domination of North America by defeating the French at Quebec. The name may have been applied to New Englanders as an extension of an original use referring to Dutch settlers living along the Hudson River. Whatever the reason, Yankee is first recorded in 1765 as a name for an inhabitant of New England. The first recorded use of the term by the British to refer to Americans in general appears in the 1780s, in a letter by Lord Horatio Nelson, no less. Around the same time it began to be abbreviated to Yank. During the American Revolution, American soldiers adopted this term of derision as a term of national pride. The derisive use nonetheless remained alive and even intensified in the South during the Civil War, when it referred not to all Americans but to those loyal to the Union. Now the term carries less emotion-except of course for baseball fans.