2014届高考英语二轮复习：阅读理解7.docVIP

2014届高考英语二轮复习：阅读理解 (2013·江苏卷·D) Mark Twain has been called the inventor of the American novel.And he surely deserves additional praise: the man who popularized the clever literary attack on racism. I say clever because anti-slavery fiction had been the important part of the literature in the years before the Civil War.H.B.Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin is only the most famous example.These early stories dealt directly with slavery.With minor exceptions, Twain planted his attacks on slavery and prejudice into tales that were on the surface about something else entirely.He drew his readers into the argument by drawing them into the story. Again and again,in the postwar years,Twain seemed forced to deal with the challenge of race.Consider the most controversial,at least today,of Twain’s novels,Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.Only a few books have been kicked off the shelves as often as Huckleberry Finn,Twain’s most widely read tale.Once upon a time,people hated the book because it struck them as rude.Twain himself wrote that those who banned the book considered the novel“trash and suitable only for the slums(贫民窟).”More recently the book has been attacked because of the character Jim,the escaped slave,and many occurrences of the word nigger.(The term Nigger Jim,for which the novel is often severely criticized,never appears in it.) But the attacks were and are silly—and miss the point.The novel is strongly anti-slavery.Jim’s search through the slave states for the family from whom he has been forcibly parted is heroic.As J.Chadwick has pointed out,the character of Jim was a first in American fiction—a recognition that the slave had two personalities,“the voice of survival within a white slave culture and the voice of the individual:Jim,the father and the man.” There is much more.Twain’s mystery novel Pudd’n-head Wilson stood as a challenge to the racial beliefs of even many of the liberals of his day.Written at a time when the accepted wisdom held Negroes to be inferior(低等的)to