美国文学史及作品选读.ppt

Essentially an affirmative writer, humanistic; but toward the latter part of his life, increasingly violent in his censure of man and his society; in his later works, change from an optimist and humorist to an almost despairing determinist; A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889), The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg (1924), The Mysterious Stranger (1916): bitter attacks on the human race. Mark Twain made colloquial speech an accepted, respectable literary medium in the literary history of the country: a significant contribution Sherwood Anderson: the first writer after Twain to take the vernacular as a serious way of presenting reality; Hemingway’s mentor in the colloquial style American realism: Local colorism and Mark twain Ernest Hemingway: the direct descendant of Mark Twain; his masculine prose, with its infinite power of suggestion and connotation, is the continuation of and improvement upon Twain’s style. In writers such as Stephen Crane, Sherwood Anderson, Sinclair Lewis, Faulkner, or Hemingway, a style that flows with the easy grace of colloquial speech and gets its directness and simplicity by leaving out subordinate words and clauses, the language of Mark Twain T. S. Eliot, Robert Frost, E. E. Cummings, William Carlos Williams, J. D. Salinger, etc. Chang Yaoxin: 159-60: The frontier had been a factor of great importance in American life. As long as the frontier was there, people could always hope to escape troubles over the next hill and have a better life ahead. Now that the frontier was about to close and the safety valve was ceasing to operate, a reexamination of life began. The worth of the American dream, the idealized, romantic view of man and his life in the New World, began to lose its hold on the imagination of the people. Beneath the glittering surface of prosperity there lay suffering and unhappiness. Disillusionment and frustration were widely felt. What had been expected to be a “Golden Age” turned out to be a “Gilded Age.” * * Un