美国部分作家的介绍.doc

马克吐温：He was an American humorist, satirist, writer, and lecturer. Twain enjoyed immense public popularity. His keen wit and incisive satire earned him praise from both critics and peers. American author William Faulkner called Mark Twain "the father of American literature”. Mark Twain (meaning "Mark number two") was a Mississippi River term. He was successively a printer’s apprentice, a tramp printer, a silver miner, a steamboat pilot on the Mississippi, and a frontier journalist in Nevada and California. His colorful experience gave his resource of his writing and a wide knowledge of humanity
1. He first won fame with the comic masterpiece “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County,” which described a frontier tale.
2. His first novel, The Gilded Age (1873), was a artistic failure, but it gave its name to the America of the post-bellum period.
3. His boyhood experience furnished him with ample material for fiction. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) was an immediate success as “a boy’s book”.
4. Its sequel, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) became his masterwork. This book was first considered adult fiction, which painted a picture of Mississippi frontier life Ernest Hemingway had such a remark---“all modern American literature comes”.
5. He set out world tour, traveling in France and Italy. His experiences were recorded in 1869 in The Innocents Abroad, which gained him wide popularity, and poked fun at both American and European prejudices and manners He criticized the hypocrisy and corruption as well as the American’s shallowness and innocence using humorous and wit tone.
His later work---The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg (1900) was filled with pessimistic and cynical tone.
His contribution:
1 .Mark Twain is a great literary artist. His contribution to the development of realism and the American literature as a whole was through his humor, his theories of localism in American fiction, and his use of colloquial speech.
2. Colloquial style aiming at expression, not decoration, conforms to the nature of a subject. The style has swept American literature and its influence on the twentieth-century American writers such as Ernest Hemingway, Robert Frost, Carl Sandburg, and T.S. Eliot is clearly visible.

Henry James: Henry James, O.M. (April 15, 1843) – February 28, 1916) was a U.S.-born British author. James is one of the key figures of 19th century literary realism. He is primarily known for a series of major novels in which he portrayed the encounter of America with Europe. His plots centered on personal relationships, the proper exercise of power in such relationships, and other moral questions. His method of writing from the point of view of a character within a tale allowed him to explore the phenomena of consciousness and perception, and his style in later works has been compared to impressionist painting. His imaginative use of point of view, interior monologue and unreliable narrators in his own novels and tales brought a new depth and interest to realistic fiction, and foreshadowed the modernist work of the twentieth century. An extraordinarily productive writer, in addition to his voluminous works of fiction he published articles and books of travel writing, biography, autobiography, and criticism, and wrote plays, some of which were performed during his lifetime with moderate success. His theatrical work is thought to have profoundly influenced his later novels and tales.
Aesthetic Ideas of Henry James:
a. The aim of novel: represent life
b. Common, even ugly side of life
c. Social function of art
d. Avoiding omniscient point of view
Style; Stylist: Henry James:
a. Language: highly-refined, polished, insightful, and accurate
b. Vocabulary: large
c. Construction: complicated, intricate
Point of view of Henry James:
a. Psychological analysis, forefather of stream of consciousness
b. Psychological realism
c. Highly-refined language

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)
Born in Boston to a clerical tradition;
Emerson's Works:
• Nature , the Bible of Transcendentalism
• “The American Scholar”, regarded as “Declaration of Intellectual Independence”
• “The Poet”, the job of a poet to be the seer, the sayer and the namer
• “Self-Reliance”, the importance of cultivating oneself
• “Each and All”, a poem in celebration of the wholeness. “Each is part of all, and all is in each.”
Emerson’s Transcendentalist Views
• 1) his doctrine of the Oversoul: “Philosophically considered, the universe is composed of Nature and the Soul…all other men and my own body, must be ranked under this name: NATURE”.
• 2) Ideas about the infinitude of man and human perfectibility.
• Quotations from Self-Reliance
• Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist.
• What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think.
• Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string.
• 3) Nature as symbolic of God.
• Nature is the vehicle of thought or the symbol of spirit
• “The lover of nature is he whose inward and outward senses are still truly adjusted to each other; who has remained the spirit of infancy even into the era of manhood.” (Nature)

Emerson’s importance in the intellectual history of America:
• His call for an independent culture represented the desire of the whole nation to develop a culture of its own.
• His aesthetics marked the birth of true American poetry.
• His reputation declined somewhat in recent years because of the cheerful optimism impregnated in his works.