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early Works
1)The celebrated Humping Frog of CalaverasCounty,
加拉维拉县有名的跳蛙
2)The Innocents Abroad傻子出国记3)The Adventures of Tom Sawyer 4)The Gilded Age镀金时代
5) A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court
亚瑟王宫廷中的美国佬
6)The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn 7) Roughing It (含辛茹苦) 8)Life on the Mississippi late works:
1) The Tragedy of Pudd?nhead Wilson (傻瓜威尔逊) 2)The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg
败坏了的赫德莱堡的人
Brief introduction
? The celebrated Humping Frog of CalaverasCounty \1865 short story by Mark Twain. It was his first great success as a writer and brought him national attention. The story has also been published as \Jumping Frog\(its original title) and \Notorious
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Jumping Frog of Calaveras County\In it, the narrator retells a story he heard from a bartender, Simon Wheeler, at the Angels Hotel in Angels Camp, California, about the gambler Jim Smiley. The narrator describes him: \he even seen a straddle bug start to go anywheres, he would bet you how long it would take him to get to wherever he going to, and if you took him up, he would foller that straddle bug to Mexico but what he would find out where he was bound for and how long he was on the road.\County, and Other Sketches is also the title story of an 1867 collection of short stories by Mark Twain. It was Twain's first book and collected 27 stories that were previously published in magazines and newspapers. ? The Innocents Abroad
The Innocents Abroad, or The New Pilgrims' Progress is a travel book by American author Mark Twain, published in 1869, which humorously chronicles what Twain called his \Pleasure Excursion\on board the chartered vessel Quaker City (formerly USS Quaker City), through Europe and the Holy Land, with a group of American travelers in 1867. It was the best-selling of Twain's works
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during his lifetime,as well as one of the best-selling travel books of all time. A major theme of the book, insofar as a book can have a theme when assembled and revised from the newspaper columns Twain sent back to America as the journey progressed, is that of the conflict between history and the modern world; the narrator continually
encounters
petty
profiteering
and
trivializations of history as he journeys, as well as a strange emphasis placed on particular past events, and is either outraged, puzzled, or bored by the encounter. One example can be found in the sequence during which the boat has stopped at Gibraltar. On shore, the narrator encounters seemingly dozens of people intent on regaling him, and everyone else, with a bland and pointless anecdote concerning how a particular hill nearby acquired its name, heedless of the fact that the anecdote is, indeed, bland, pointless, and entirely too repetitive. Another example may be found in the discussion of the story of Abelard and Heloise, where the skeptical American deconstructs the story and comes to the conclusion that far too much fuss has been made about the two lovers. Only when the ship reaches areas
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of the world that do not exploit for profit or bore passers-by with inexplicable interest in their history, such as the passage dealing with the ship's time at the Canary Islands, is this attitude not found in the text. ? The Gilded Age
The Gilded Age in United States history is the late 19th century, from the 1870s to about 1900. The term for this period came into use in the 1920s and 30s and was derived from writer Mark Twain's 1873 The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today, which satirized an era of serious social problems masked by a thin gold gilding. The early half of the Gilded Age roughly coincided with the middle portion of the Victorian era in Britain and Belle époque in France. It was preceded by the Reconstruction Era that ended in 1877 and was succeeded by the Progressive Era that began in the 1890s.The Gilded Age was an era of rapid economic growth, especially in the North and West. As American wages were much higher than those in Europe, especially for skilled workers, the period saw an influx of millions of European immigrants. The rapid expansion of industrialization led to real wage growth of 60% between 1860 and 1890, spread across the
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ever-increasing labor force. The average annual wage per industrial worker (including men, women and children) rose from $380 in 1880 to $564 in 1890, a gain of 48%. However, the Gilded Age was also an era of abject poverty and inequality as millions of immigrants—many
from
impoverished
European
nations—poured into the United States, and the high concentration of wealth became more visible and contentious.
? A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court the narrator—implied to be Twain himself—describes meeting the title character at Warwick Castle, drawn by his \simplicity, his marvelous familiarity with ancient armor, and the restfulness of his company\(0.1).The Yankee (a.k.a. Hank) asks him if he knows anything about the transmigration of souls—kind of a weird question for someone you've just met, right? The narrator says that he doesn't.The Yankee departs and the narrator avoids boredom by reading Malory (big mistake), taking in a story about Sir Launcelot killing two giants.As the narrator sets the book down, he hears a knock at the door. It's the Yankee. The narrator sits him
美国文学选读马克吐温
