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Mark Twain, the pen name of Samuel Langhorne Clemens, usually
wrote about his own personal experiences and things he knew about from firsthand experiences.
At the heart of Mark Twain’s achievement is his creation of two characters: Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn.Mark Twain was born on November 30, 1835, in the village of Florida, Missouri, and grew up in the larger river town of Hannibal. The steamboats which passed daily were the fascination of the town and became the subject matter of Twain’s Life on the Mississippi.
Ernest Hemingway, whose own style is based on Twain’s, once said, “All modern American literature comes from The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.”
Stephen Crane, the first American naturalist, was not much influenced by the scientific approach. He was a genius with amazing sympathy and imagination.
In The Red Badge of Courage, Stephen Crane’s greatest novel, the accident of war makes a young man seem to be a hero. War
changes men into animals. In the view of the author, good or bad, hero or coward, are merely matters of chance, of fate.Hamlin Garland developed a writing method which he called “veritism” (meaning truth). He described people, places and events in a careful and factual manner.Henry Jameswas a realist, but not a naturalist. He was an observer of the mind rather than a recorder of time. His realism was a special kind of psychological realism.Henry James first achieved recognition as a writer of the “International”novel--- a story which brings together persons of various nationalists who represent certain charactistics.
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The Portrait of a Ladyis the best novel of Henry James’“middle
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period”. It is a story about a young, bright American girl who goes to Europe to explore life.Dreiser’s greatest novel An American Tragedy, reveals a last stage in his thinking of social consciousness.
Darwinism had an evident influence on naturalism. It seemed to stress the animality of man, to suggest that man was dominated by the forces of evolution.
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The Art of Fiction
was Henry James’most famous and influential
critical essay written in response to a lecture on fiction delivered by an English novelist.
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Multiple choice
___, who became the editor of Harper’s Monthly in 1891,created the first theory for American realism.A. Emile Zola B. Hamlin GarlandC. Stephen Crane D. William Dean Howells___ in the 1860s was the first American writer of local color to achieve wide popularity.
A. Mark Twain B. William Dean HowellsC. Bret Harte D. Harriet Beecher Stowe
Stephen Crane’s novel: Maggie: A Girl of the Street, is the
story of a girl ___.
A.who is brought up in a poor area of Chicago
B.who is loved by her family but betrayed by her friends.C.who experienced the violence and cruelty of the society
almost every day D.who is evil by nature.
In his short story, ___, Stephen Crane shows how even life and death are determined by fate.
A. ‘The Open Boat’ B. ‘The Open Window’C. ‘War Is Kind’ D. ‘War is Slaughterhouse’The naturalism of ___ was filled with deep sympathy for the common people. His literature was a form of protests against the conditions which made the lives of Mid-western farmers so painful and unhappy.
A. Harold Frederic B. Ambrose BierceC. Henry James D. Hamlin GarlandThe novel which was described by an American critic as “an outrage to American girlhood” is Henry James’ ___.A. Daisy Miller B. The Portrait of a Lady
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C. Woman in Love D. Awakening7.Mark Twain’s first novel, ___, was an artistic failure, but it
gave its name to the America of the period which it attempts to satirize.
A. The Gilded Age B. Life on the MississippiC. The Innocents Abroad D. The Mysterious Stranger8.Jack London was at his height of his powers when he wrote ___,
which is deeply influenced by Darwinism.A. The Sea Wolf B. To Build a Fire
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C. The Call of the Wild D. Martin EtonWith the publication of ___ in 1900, Theodore Dreiser committed his literary force to opening the new ground of American
naturalism.
A. An American TragedyB. Sister CarrieC. The Bulwark D. The Stoic10.In his works, Theodore Dreiser’s tone is always ___.
A. sad B. satirical C. comic D. serious
IV.Questions and answers
1.In The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Huck Finn is a
thirteen-year-old boy. Why does Mark twain use a child as the center of consciousness in this bookIn using a child protagonist, Twain is able to imply a comparison
between the powerlessness and vulnerability of a child and the powerlessness and vulnerability of a black man in pre-Civil War America. Huck and Jim frequently find themselves in the same predicaments: each is abused, each faces the threat of losing his freedom, and each is constantly at the mercy of adult white
men. In Huck’s moral dilemmas, Jim is also vulnerable to Huck who is white. Twain also uses his child protagonist to dramatize the conflict between societal or received morality. As a boy,
Huck is a character who can develop morally, whose mind is still open and being formed, who does not take his principles and values for granted. By tracing the education and experiences of a boy, Twain shows that conclusions about right and wrong that are based on logic and experience. The society’s rules and morals are often hypocritical rather than logical.Discuss the influence of Charles Darwin’s theories on The Call of the Wild.
In writing his novel, Jack London was profoundly influenced by the writings of Charles Darwin. Darwin, the founding father of evolution theory, thought that life in the national world consists of a constant struggle for survival, in which only the strong could thrive and produce offspring. This “survival of the fittest”was the engine that drove evolution. The world that London creates in The Call of the Wild operates strictly according to Darwinist principles in its brutality and amorality, only the fit survives in the cruel landscape of the Klondike.What is special about Mark Twain’s realism
Mark Twain’s contribution to the development of realism and to American literature as a whole was partly through his theories
of local color in American fiction, and partly through his colloquial style. Mark Twain drew heavily from his own rich fund of knowledge of people and places. He confined himself to the
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life with which he was familiar. By quoting from his own experience, he managed to transform into art the freedom and humor, in short, the finest elements of western culture.
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20 Century American Poetry
Literary terms
Imagism: Imagism is a school of poetry that flourished in North
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America and England at the beginning of the 20century. Imagists
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rejected the sentimentalism of late 19 century verse in favor of the poetry that relied on concrete imagery. Ezra Pound originally led the movement. Amy Lowell soon became its proponent. The major criteria are : a) regularly use everyday speech but avoids clichéｓ; b) create new rhythms; c) address any subject matter the poet desired; d)depict its subjects through precise, clear images. The poets include ., Carl Sandburg; William Carlos William, D. H. Lawrence etc.Confessional poetry:An autobiographical mode of verse that reveals the poet’s personal problems with unusual frankness.
The term is usually applied to certain poets of the US. From the late 1950s to the late 1960s, notably Robert Lowell, whose Life
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Studies and For the Union Dead
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deal with his divorce and mental
breakdowns. Other examples are Anne Sexton’s To Bedlamand Part Way Back, including poems on abortion and life in mental hospitals. John Berryman’s Dream Songson alcoholism and insanity; Sylvia Plath’s poems on suicide in Arieland . Snodgrass’Heart’s Needle on divorce. Black Mountain poets: A loosely associated group of poets that formed an important part of the avant-garde of American poetry in the 1950s, publishing innovative yet disciplined verse in the
(1954-57), which became a leading forum Black Mountain Review
of experimental verse. Their experimental yet disciplined style
took its impetus from the essay “Projective Verse” (1950) by Charles Olson. The Black Mountain School is linked with Charles Olson’s theory of “projective verse”, which insists on an open from based on the spontaneity of the breath pause in speech and the typewriter line in writing. The group grew up around the poets Robert Creeley, Robert Duncan and Charles Olson while they were teaching at Black Mountain.The Beat Generation:The term Beat Generation was introduced by Jack Kerouac in approximately 1948 to describe his social circle to a novelist who published an early novel about the generation. The members of the beat generation were engaged in a spontaneous,
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messy creativity. The beat writers produced a body of written work controversial both for its advocacy of non-conformity and for its non-conforming style. The major beat writings are Jack
Herouac’sOn the Road, Allan Ginsberg’s Howl and William Burroughs’Naked Lunch.
The New York School:Unlike the Beat poets, the poets of the New
York School are not interested in overtly moral questions and in general, they steer clear of political issues. They have the
best formal education of any group. The major figures of the New
York School—John Ashberry, Frank O’Harra and
Kenneth
Koch—met while they were undergraduates at Harvard University. They are quintessentially urban, cool, nonreligious, witty with a poignant, pastel sophistication. Their poems are fast moving, full of urban detail, incongruity and an almost palpable sense of suspended belief. New York city is the fine arts center of America and the birthplace of abstract expressionism a major inspiration of this poetry. Most of the poets worked as art reviewers or museum curators, or collaborated with painters. Perhaps because of their feeling for abstract art, which distrusts figurative shapes and obvious meanings, their work is often difficult to comprehend, as in the later work of John Ashbery.
Imagism is a poetic movement of England and the United States, which flourished from 1980-1917.
Generally considered the leader of the imagist movement, Ezra Pound borrowed techniques from classical Chinese and Japanese poetry and produced poems stressing clarity, precision and economy of language and foregoing traditional rhyme and meter.
The Waste Landby .
Eliot is regarded as a central text of
modernism. It is said to catch precisely the state of culture and society after Word War I and graphically illustrate the spiritual poverty of the West of that time.Published in 1917, Prufrock and Other Observations immediately established . Eliot as a leading poem of the avant-garde. The most notable poem in this collection is entitled ‘The Love Song of Alfred J. Pruforck’.
In 1927, . Eliot became a Britishcitizen and converted from the Unitarian Church to the Church of England.Among the imagists, . is credited with giving a female voice to classical myths.
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