《美国文学》课件十八.ppt

Lecture Eighteen Realism and Mark Twain (1835-1910) ;The Art of Fiction;The Art of Fiction;The Art of Fiction;Local Colorism;D. The appearance of Bret Harte’s “The Luck of Roaring Camp” in 1868 marked a significant development in the brief history of local color fiction. E. Local color fiction that came to prominence in the USA in the late 19th century, and was devoted to capturing the unique customs, manners, speech, folklore, and any other qualities of a particular regional community, usually in humorous short stories.;F. local colorists concerned themselves with presenting and interpreting the local character of their regions, major local colorists including: Mark Twain Mrs. Stowe (1811-1896) Bret Harte (1836-1902) Hamlin Garland (1860-1940, short story writer and poet) and others. ;Mark Twain’s contribution to American literature;Mark Twain; Themes and Views As a local colorist, Mark Twain preferred to represent life through portraits of local places which he knew best, and confined himself to the life with which he was familiar, convinced that the most valuable material for the novel is personal experiences; he tried to transform imaginatively “the usable past” into literature; ;His “usable past” was mostly related to the Mississippi river and the American West (Mark Twain was born on the Mississippi river and was once a steamboat pilot on it and a frontier journalist in Nevada and California), which became his major theme;;the Mississippi river ;Twain’s major works 1) With the publication of his frontier tale of local color, “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” (1864), Twain became nationally famous;;Calaveras County;2) The Gilded Age (1873): Twain’s first novel, an artistic failure; mainly remembered for its title, which has been accepted as a designation of the years immediately following the Civil War; marked the end of the Romantic period in American literature and the beginning of the American realistic literature. ;16;3)