美国文学Lecture 9.pptVIP

Lecture 9  Local colorism: Mark Twain Local Colorism The detailed representation in prose fiction of the setting, dialect, customs, dress, and ways of thinking and feeling which are distinctive of a particular region, such as Thomas Hardy’s “Wessex” or Rudyard Kipling’s India. After the Civil War a number of American writers exploited the literary possibilities of local color in various parts of America; for example, the West (Bret Harte), the Mississippi region (Mark Twain), the South (George Washington Cable), the Midwest (E.W. Howe, Hamlin Garland), and New England (Sarah Orne Jewett and Mary Wilkins Freeman). The term “local color writing” is often applied to works which, like O.Henry’s or Damon Runyon’s stories set in New York City, rely for their interest mainly on a sentimental or comic representation of the surface particularities of a region, instead of on more deep-seated, complex, and general human characteristics and problems. Mark Twain pseudonym of Samuel L. Clemens. born in Florida, Mo. (Missouri), was the son of a Virginian imbued with the frontier spirit and grandiose dreams of easy wealth. Mark Twain Journeyman printer, steamboat pilot, miner, and journalist In 1870 Clemens married Olivia Langdon. Mrs. Clemens belonged to a genteel, conservative society. External events soon interfered with the even flow of Clemens’s creative activity--investment and bankruptcy. Mark Twain gave the new post-Civil War boom-time America its name in a novel of the present, The Gilded Age (1873), a satirical novel in which he collaborated with C.D. Warner. In The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) Mark Twain presents a nostalgic tale boyish adventure in a Mississippi town and the Valley. In The Adventure of Huckleberry Finn (1884), his masterpiece of Vernacular realism, Mark Twain moved farther into the past. He drew on his own boyhood and his years as a cub pilot. He celebrates the flowering of Mississippi Valley frontier civilization, in terms of