英美文学3

Late 19th and Early 20th Century American Literature

From the late 19th to the early 20th centuries, the United States experienced enormous industrial, economic, social and cultural change. All of these changes resulted largely from

a great historical event-- The Civil War

Historical background

The Civil War (1861-1865),which was largely a struggle of industry and capitalist democracy against agriculture and salvery,was a turning point in American history. the south lost the Civil War in 1865. Robert Edward Lee capitulated in April 9th meant that the Civil War was over. This test showed itself in the following aspects.

First of all, the Civil War made the American quit their illusionary idea of war.

Secondly,people’s concepts of man was changed by the war.

Thirdly,the war worked as an impetus to industrialization and urbanization.

Realism

a mode of writing that gives the impression of recording or “reflecting” faithfully an actual way of life. Modern criticism frequently insists that realism is not a direct or simple reproduction of reality but a system of conventions producing a lifelike illusion of some “real” world outside the text, by processes of selection, exclusion, description, and manners of addressing the reader.

Features of Realism

1.Emphasizes objectivity and offers an objective rather than an idealistic view of human nature and human experience.

2.Realists seek truth that is verifiable by experience and have practical consequences. They expressed the concern for the world of experience, of the commonplace, and for the familiar and the low.

3.Realism is embedded in a mimetic theory of art. Realists believe that literature imitates realitytures of Realism

Representatives of American Realism

 Mark Twain 马克·吐温

 William Dean Howells 威廉·迪恩·豪威尔斯

 Henry James 亨利·詹姆斯

Mark Twain

Samuel Langhorne Clemens (November 30, 1835 – April 21, 1910),]better known by his pen name Mark Twain, was an American author andhumorist. Mark Twain (1835 – 19l0) is a great literary giant of America, whom H. L. Mencken considered “the true father of our national literature.” With works like Adventure of Huckleberry Finn (1884) and Life on the Mississippi (1883) Twain shaped the world’s view of America and made a more extensive combination of American folk humor and serious literature than previous writers had ever done.

Early life

Mark Twain, Pen name of Samuel Langhorne Clemens, was born on November 30, 1835, in Missouri, and grew up in the river town of Hannibal. After his father died, he began to seek his own fortune .He once worked as a journeyman printer, a steamboat pilot, a newspaper colunist and as a deadpan lecturer. Twain’s writing took the form of humorous journalism of the time, and it ennabled him to master the technique of narration.

Twain grew up in Hannibal, Missouri, which provided the setting for Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer. After an apprenticeship with a printer, he worked as a typesetter and contributed articles to his older brother Orion’s newspaper. He later became a riverboat pilot on the Mississippi River before heading west to join Orion in Nevada. He referred humorously to his singular lack of success at mining, turning to journalism for the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise. In 1865, his humorous story, “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” was published, based on a story he heard at Angels Hotel in Angels Camp California where he had spent some time as a miner. The short story brought international attention, even being translated to classic Greek. His wit and satire, in prose and in speech, earned praise from critics and peers, and he was a friend to presidents, artists, industrialists, and European royalty.

Though Twain earned a great deal of money from his writings and lectures, he invested in ventures that lost a great deal of money, notably the Paige Compositor, which failed because of its complexity and imprecision. In the wake of these financial setbacks he filed for protection from his creditors via a bankruptcy filing, and with the help of Henry Huttleston Rogers eventually overcame his financial troubles. Twain chose to pay all his pre-bankruptcy creditors in full, though he had no responsibility to do this under the law.

Twain was born shortly after a visit by Halley’s Comet, and he predicted that he would “go out with it,” too. He died the day following the comet’s subsequent return. He was lauded as the “greatest American humorist of his age,” and William Faulkner called Twain “the father of American literature.”

Mark Twain’s major works

《哈克贝里·费恩历险记》The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn 1884,

《汤姆·索亚历险记》 The Adventures of Tom Sawyer 1876

《王子与贫儿》 The Prince and the Pauper,1882

《卡拉维拉斯县著名的跳蛙》The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County 1856,

《无辜的》The Innocents Abroad,1869

《镀金时代》The Gilded Age,1873

《亚瑟王朝廷里的康涅狄格州的美国佬》A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court,1889

《傻瓜威尔逊的悲剧》The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson,1889

《败坏了赫德莱堡的人》The Man That Corrupted hadleyburg,1900

Mark Twain’s Writing Style

1) Twain as a local colorist

Twain is also known as a local colorist, who preferred to present social life through portraits of the local characters of his regions, including people living in that area, the landscape, and other peculiarities like the customs, dialects, costumes and so on. Consequently, the rich material of his boyhood experience on the Mississippi became the endless resources for his fiction, and the Mississippi valley and the West became his major theme. Unlike James and Howe1ls, Mark Twain wrote about the lower-class people, because they were the people he knew so we1l ancl their 1ife was the one he himself had lived. Moreover he successfully used local color and historical settings to i1lustrate and shed light on the contemporary society.

2) His use of vernacular

Another fact that made Twain unique is his magic power with language, his use of vernacular. His words are col1oquial, concrete and direct in effect, and his sentence structures are simp1e, even ungrammatical, which is typical of the spoken 1anguage. Besides, different characters from different literary or cultural backgrounds talk differently, as is the case with Huck, Tom, and Jim.

3) His humor

Mark Twain’s humor is remarkable, too. It is fun to read Twain to begin with, for most of his works tend to be funny, containing some practical jokes, comic details, witty remarks, etc., and some of them are actually tall ta1es.

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

1) What is the book about?

Huckleberry Finn, by general agreement, is Twain’s finest book and an outstanding American novel. Its narrator is Huck, a youngster whose carelessly recorded vernacular speech is admirably adapted to detailed and poetic description of scenes, vivid representations of characters, and narrative renditions that are both broadly comic and subtly ironic.

Huck, son of the village drunkard, is uneducated, superstitious, and sometimes credulous; but he also has a native shrewdness, a cheerfulness that is hard to put down, compassionate tolerance, and an instinctive tendency to reach the right decisions about important matters. He runs away from his persecuting father and, with his companion, the runaway slave Jim, makes a long and frequently interrupted voyage floating down the Mississippi River on a raft. During the journey Huck meets and comes to know members of greatly varied groups, so that the book memorably portrays almost every class living on or along the river. Huck overcomes his initial prejudices and learns to respect and love Jim.

2) The significance of the novel

The book marks the climax of Twain’s literary creativity. Hemingway once described the novel the one book from which “all modern American literature comes.”

The book is significant in many ways. First of all, the novel is written in a language that is totally different from the rhetorical language used by Emerson, Poe, and Melville. Secondly, the great strength of the book also comes from the shape given to it by the course of the raft’s journey down the Mississippi as Huck and Jim seek their different kinds of freedom. Twain, who knew the river intimately, uses it here both realistically and symbolically. Thirdly, the profound portrait of Huckleberry Finn is another great contribution of the book to the legacy of American literature.

Remark

William Faulkner called Twain “the father of American literature.”

Mark Twain is a great social critic as well as a great humorist in the late 19th century. Twain s humor is distinguished for his liberal use of funny American vernacular style,which breaks away from the influence of British traditional literature and fully embodies the spirit of America.

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