美国文学选读--Lecture6.ppt

The Age of Realism(1865-1914)An important transitional period in American historyBackgroundAmerican Civil War(1861-1865)The industrialized North fought the agrarian South,the factory defeated the plantation,and the USA headed toward capitalism.IndustrializationAmerican economy developed very fast in the late part of the 19th century.Extremes of wealth and poverty appeared.Money concentrated into a small group of people while the masses struggled for survival.Most people in the country developed strong ambition for power and money.Closing FrontierAs the frontier was losing,Americans began to lose hope to go to the west and they became more practical to face daily life.The worth of the American dream,the idealized,romantic view of man and his life in the new world,began to lose.disillusionment and frustration were widely felt.What had been expected to be a“Golden Age”turned out to be a“Gilded”one.Darwins publication of The Origin of the SpeciesThis book was adopted by big business.Just as Darwin proposed that only the fittest of the species survives,capitalists considered themselves the highest product of civilization.The forces that were behind the city-ward movement were chances to change,which is considered as a kind of human and social evolution.RealismA.Timethe latter half of the 19the century,esp.1870s,1880sB.FeaturesRealism comes as a reaction against“the lie”of Romanticism.It expresses the concern for the world of the commonplace,and for the familiar and the low.Realists tries to vividly describe details from observation of actual life.Realists tries to offer an objective rather than an idealized view of human nature and society.The language is plain,natural and objective.C.Representative writersWilliam Dean Howells:He must write what he observed and knew.Henry James:Life should be the main object of the novel.Mark Twain:Writers should keep in their mind the soul,the life,and the speech of the peopleAmerican NaturalismIt is a literary movement in 1890s.It is a more advanced stage of realism.The American naturalists accept the more negative interpretation of Darwins theory and stress the powerlessness of people in the environment and society.They focus mainly on the lowest class,trodden people and their destiny.The subject matters are the conflict,cruelty,death,violence,misery and sex.They write objectively and indifferently.Jack London Stephen Crane naturalism Theodore Dreiser Henry James psychological realism Mark Twain local colorism American naturalism pessimistic realismRealistic writersMark Twain（1835-1910）All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finnits the best book weve had.-HemingwayMark Twain,pseudonym of Samuel Langhorne Clemens,was born in Missouri,and was brought up in the river town of Hannibal.He worked as a printer,wandering as far from home as New York and Philadelphia.In about 1859,after two years of training,Clemens became a licensed and highly paid pilot,traveling between St.Louis and New Orleans.During the Civil War,he served two weeks as a lieutenant in the Confederate Army,and then went to Nevada with his brother to find gold.Mark TwainAt 29,he became a locally famous writer of newspaper column,and just then he got for himself a name“Mark Twain”,meaning 12 feet deep,and also bringing him back happy memories of the pilot life.In 1885,at the height of his popularity,Mark Twains life took a sudden downward turn,when his son and two daughters died and he lost a large part of his fortune through unwise investments.On the night of April 21,1910,he died peacefully in bed.WorksThe Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras Country(1867)The gilded Age (1873)The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876)Innocents Abroad (1880)Life on the Mississippi (1883)The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884)Features of Mark Twains Generation1.“Boom and bust”2.Wealth and fame3.Business conquering spiritual cultivation4.Science and technology(oil,railroads,steel and coal)5.Henry Fords Model T car of the 1900s6.Modern commercialization(salesman)7.Advertisement(newspapers)8.The Gold RushMark Twains literary contributions1.American literature-from local to national2.Lecture platform-public entertainment3.First-person narrative in American literature4.Use of common language5.Description of American blacks(Jim)6.The creator of American Boyhood(Tom Sawyer:innocent,good-hearted,easy to get along with,honest,humorous,witty,country wisdom)Writing style1.colloquial,vernacular language2.local color3.sentences-simple and brief4.humor5.highly exaggerated6.social criticismLocal ColorismIt is a type of writing that was popular in the 19th century,particularly among authors in the South of the U.S.The style relied heavily on using words,phrases,and slang that were native to the particular region in which the story took place.A well-known local colorism author was Mark Twain with his books The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.