Local color fiction
美国文学史名词解释
1. PuritanismIt were flourishing from the beginning of 17th to the middle period of 18th. They stressed predestination, original sin, total depravity, and limited atonement from God‟s grace. They went to America to prove that they were God‟s chosen people w ho would enjoy God‟s blessings on earth and in Heaven. Finally, they built a way of life that stressed hard work, thrift, piety, and sobriety. Both doctrinaire and an opportunist.Its Influence on literary were as follows:（影响）(1) American Literature is based on a myth ------ the Biblical myth of the Garden of Eden. (2)The American Puritan‟s metaphorical made of perception ---- symbolism. The representatives were Edwards(The Freedom of the Will), Franklin(On the Art of Self-improvement), Crevecoeur(Letters from an American Farmer).代表作家及代表作：Captain John Smith True Relation of Virginia (1608)Anne Bradstreet “To My Dear and Loving Husband”Benjamin Franklin: The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin2. American RomanticismRomanticism was a complex artistic, literary and intellectual movement that originated in the second half of the 18th century in Europe, and gained strength in reaction to the Industrial Revolution.Elements of Romanticism1. Frontier: vast expanse, freedom, no geographic limitations.2. Optimism: greater than in Europe because of the presence of frontier.不要这么多，我就删掉了3、4、5条。
Mark Twain
Samuel's father was a judge, and he built a two-story frame house at 206 Hill Street in 1844. As a youngster, Samuel was kept indoors because of poor health. However, by age nine, he seemed to recover from his ailments and joined the rest of the town's children outside. He then attended a private school in Hannibal.
When Samuel was 12, his father died of pneumonia(肺炎), and at 13, Samuel left school to become a printer's apprentice. After two short years, he joined his brother Orion's newspaper as a printer and editorial assistant. It was here that young Samuel found he enjoyed writing.
Local color writing exists primarily for the portrayal of the people and life of a geographical setting‖ (Holman 295). Local colorism is the detailed representation in prose fiction of the setting, dialect, customs, dress and ways of thinking and feeling which are distinctive of a particular region.
Local_Colorism剖析
Clemens's house in Hartford
Francis Bret Harte
(1836-1902)
Francis Bret Harte
(August 25, 1836– May 6, 1902布勒特・哈特)
❖ an American author and poet, best remembered for his accounts of pioneering life in California. American author, essayist, humorist, and critic wrote The Luck of Roaring Camp (1870), one of his first and most successful works.
Local Colorism
❖ Local Colorism or Regionalism ( first made its presence in the late 1860s and early 1870s. It did not cease to be a dominant fashion until the turn of the 20th century.
--realism-local color fiction解读
Local Color Fiction
• Local color fiction was a form of Regionalism, which “exploits the speech, dress, mannerisms, habits of thought which are peculiar to a certain region. Local color writing existed primarily for the portrayal of the people and life of a geographical setting. It was the detailed representation in prose fiction of the setting, dialect, customs, dress and ways of thinking and feeling which were distinctive of a particular region. Stories of local colorism had a quality of circumstantial authenticity, as local colorists tried to immortalize the distinctive natural, social and linguistic features. They were strong sketches of an environment. Hamlin Garland’s “Under the Lion’s Paw” was a good example of them.
Representatives
• The writers who contributed most to regionalism were women such as Sarah Orne Jewett, Kate Choppin and Harriet Beecher Stowe. Regional literature served to bring the nation closer together after the Civil War. And Mark Twin was a prime example of Regionalism which brought information, life style, and language from different regions to a national audience.
Local Colorism美国文学简史
Local ColorismLocal Colorism as a trend first made its presence felt in the late 1860’s and early seventies in America. Local colorists concerned themselves with presenting and interpreting the local character of their regions like the characters, dialect, customs and other features particular to the specific region.Marked differences existed between different parts of the country when the U.S expanded westward. The rest of the country keenly felt the psychological need to assert their cultural identity by showing their local character. The frontier humorists, who had flourished several decades before the Civil War, had prepared the literary ground for local colorism. And after the Civil War a good number of periodicals appeared usually willing to accept and pay well for local color short stories.Local colorists emphasized on physical setting and those distinctive qualities of landscape which condition human thought and behavior. The settings are frequently remote and inaccessible. The narrator is typically an educated observer who serves as mediator between the rural folk of the tale and the urban audience to whom the tale is directed. Local color stories tend to be concerned with the character of the district or region rather than with the individual. Local colorists use detailed description contributing to an understanding of the region and dialect to establish credibility and authenticity of regional characters. A frame story is frequently used.The appearance of Bret Harte’s The Luck of Roaring Camp marked a significant development in the brief history of local color fiction. Mark Twain’s stories are peculiar to Mississippi and West. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn written by Mark Twain gives us a vivid portrayal of realistic characters and truthful depiction of life on the Mississippi. The use of colloquial speech, making it an acceptable and respectable literary medium. He showed deep concern and sympathy on African American. Thinly veiled behind the mask of humor and satire, Twain's writing often critiqued social morals, politics and human nature.。
美国文学名词解释（全的哦）
1. Allusion: A reference to a person, a place, an event, or a literary work that a writer expects the reader to recognize and respond to. An allusion may be drawn from history, geography, literature, or religion.2. American Naturalism:American naturalism was a new and harsher realism. American naturalism had been shaped by the war; by the social upheavals that undermined the comforting faith of an earlier age. America’s literary naturalists dismissed the validity of comforting moral truths. They attempted to achieve extreme objectivity and frankness, presenting characters of low social and economic classes who were determined by their environment and heredity. In presenting the extremes of life, the naturalists sometimes displayed an affinity to the sensationalism of early romanticism, but unlike their romantic predecessors, the naturalists emphasized that the world was amoral, that men and women had no free will, that lives were controlled by heredity and environment, that the destiny of humanity was misery in life and oblivion in death. Although naturalist literature described the world with sometimes brutal realism, it sometimes also aimed at bettering the world through social reform.3 American Puritanism: Puritanism is the practices and beliefs of the Puritans. The Puritans were originally members of a division of the Protestant Church. The first settlers who became the founding fathers of the American nation were quite a few of them. They were a group of serious, religious people, advocating highly religious and moral principles. As the word itself hints, Puritans wanted to purity their religious beliefs and practices. They accepted the doctrine of predestination, original sin and total depravity, and limited atonement through a special infusion of grace form God. As a culture heritage, Puritanism did have a profound influence on the early American mind. American Puritanism also had an enduring influence on American literature.4. American Realism: in American literature, the Civil War brought the Romantic Period to an end. The Age of Realism came into existence. It came as a reaction against the lie of romanticism and sentimentalism. Realism turned from an emphasis on the strange toward a faithful rendering of the ordinary, a slice of life as it is really lived. It expresses the concern for commonplace and the low, and it offers an objective rather than an idealistic view of human nature and human experience.5. American Romanticism:The Romantic Period covers the first half of the 19th century. A rising America with its ideals of democracy and equality, its industrialization, its westward expansion, and a variety of foreign influences were among the important factors which made literary expansion and expression not only possible but also inevitable in the period immediately following the nation’s political independence. Yet, romantics frequently shared certain general characteristics: moral enthusiasm, faith in value of individualism and intuitive perception, and a presumption that the natural world was a source of goodness and man’s societies a source of corruption. Romantic values were prominent in American politics, art, and philosophy until the Civil War. The romantic exaltation of the individual suited the nation’s revolutionary heritage and its f rontier egalitarianism.6. American Transcendentalism:Transcendentalists terrors from the romantic literature of Europe. They spoke for cultural rejuvenation and against the materialism of Americagogopirit, or the Oversoul, as the most important thing in the Universe. They stressed the importance of the individual. To them, the individual was the most importantelement of society. They offered a fresh perception of nature as symbolic of the Spirit or God. Nature was, to them, alive, filled with God’s over whelming presence. Transcendentalism is based on the belief that the most fundamental truths about life and death can be reached only by going beyond the world of the senses. Emerson’s Nature has been called the “Manifesto of American Transcendentalism” an d his The American Scholar has been rightly regarded as America’s “Declaration of Intellectual Independence”.7. Dramatic monologue: A kind of narrative poem in which one character speaks to one or more listeners whose replies are not given in the poem. The occasion is usually a crucial one in the speaker’s personality as well as the incident that is the subject of the poem.8. Enlightenmen t: With the advent of the 18th century, in England, as in other European countries, there sprang into life a public movement known as the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment on the whole, was an expression of struggle of the then progressive class of bourgeois against feudalism. The egogo inequality, stagnation, prejudices and other survivals of feudalism. The attempted to place all branches of science at the service of mankind by connecting them with the actual deeds and requirements of the people.9. Imagism:It’s a poetic movement of England and the U.S. flourished from 1909 to 1917.The movement insists on the creation of i mages in poetry by “the direct treatment of the thing” and the economy of wording. The leaders of this movement were Ezra Pound and Amy Lowell.10. Local Colorism: Local Colorism or Regionalism as a trend first made its presence felt in the late 1860s and early seventies in America. It may be defined as the careful attegogoms in speech, dress or behavior peculiar to a geographical locality. The ultimate aim of the local colorists is to create the illusion of an indigenous little world with qualities that tell it apart from the world outside. The social and intellectual climate of the country provided a stimulating milieu for the growth of local color fiction in America. Local colorists concerned themselves with presenting and interpreting the local character of their regions. They tended to idealize and glorify, but they never forgot to keep an eye on the truthful color of local life. They formed an important part of the realistic movement. Although it lost its momentum toward the end of the 19th century, the local spirit continued to inspire and fertilize the imagination of author.11. Lost Generation: This term has been used again and again to describe the people of the postwar years. It describes the Americans who remained in Paris as a colony of “ expatriates” or exiles. It describes the writers like Hemingway who lived in semi poverty. It describes the Americans who returned to their native land with an intense awareness of living in an unfamiliar changing world. The young English and American expatriates, men and women, were caught in the war and cut off from the old values and yet unable to come to terms with the new era when civilization had gone mad. They wandered pointlessly and restlessly, enjoying things like fishing, swimming, bullfight and beauties of nature, but they were aware all the while that the world is crazy and meaningless and futile. Their whole life is undercut and defeated.12. Beat Generation: the Beat writers were a small group of close friends first, and a movement later. The term “Beat Generation” gradually came to represent an entire periodin time, but the entire original Beat Generation in literature was small enough to have fit into a couple of cars. The term was created by Jack Kerouac in 1948.The original word meant nothing mo re than “bad” or “ruined” or “spent” or “beaten-down, beaten-up and beaten-out”. The connotation is defeat, resignation, and disappointment.This kind of beatness is what Kerouac was describing in himself and his friends, bright young Americans who ha d come of age during WWII but couldn’t fit in as clean-cut soldiers or complacent young businessmen. They were beat because they didn’t believe in straight jobs and had to struggle to survive, living in dirty apartments, selling drugs or committing crimes for food money, hitchhiking across the country because they couldn’t stay still without getting bored. But the term “beat” had a second meaning: beatific or sacred and holy. Kerouac, a devout Catholic, explained many times that by describing his generation as beat he was trying to capture the secret holiness of the down trodden. In fact, this is probably the most central theme in Kerouac’s work.The Beats were essentially anarchic. They rejected conventional social and moral values; expressed their ali enation in their works from conventional “square” society by adopting a life style which featured sex, drugs, jazz and the freedom of the open road. Literally, the Beats were all experimenters who sought to express spontaneity of thought and feeling in a seemingly formless verse as Ginsberg did or prose as Kerouac. They tended to blur the line between poetry and prose in their writing, adopting rhythms of simple American speech and of so-called progressive jazz, so such so that the Beat style was criticized as likely to contribute more to American slang than to American letters. Perhaps in this sense they are postmodernist.13. Pre-Romanticism: It originated among the conservative groups of men and letters asa reaction against Enlightenment and found its mo st manifest expression in the “Gothic novel”. The term arising from the fact that the greater part of such romances were devoted to the medieval times.14. Psalm: A song or lyric poem in praise of God.15. Psychological Realism:It is the realistic writing that probes deeply into the complexities of characters’ thoughts and motivations. Henry James is considered the founder of psychological realism. His novel The Ambassadors is considered to be a masterpiece of psychological realism.16. Renaissance: The term originally indicated a revival of classical (Greek and Roman) arts and sciences after the dark ages of medieval obscurantism.17. Romanticism: A movement that flourished in literature, philosophy, music, and art in Western culture during most of the 19th century, beginnigogom.18. Satire: A kind of writing that holds up to ridicule or contempt the weaknesses and wrongdoings of individuals, groups, institutions, or humanity in general. The aim of satirists is to set a moral standard for society, and they attempt to persuade the reader to see their point of view through the force of laughter.19. Symbol: A symbol is a sign which suggests more than its literal meaning. In other words, a symbol is both literal and figurative. A symbol is a way of telling a story and a way of conveying meaning. The best symbols are those that are believable in the lives of the characters and also convincing as they convey a meaning beyond the literal level of thestory. If the symbol is obscure or ambiguous, then the very obscurity and the ambiguity may also be part of the meaning of the story.20. Symbolism: Symbolism is the writing technique of using symbols. It’s a literary movement that arose in France in the last half of the 19th century and that greatly influenced many English writers, particularly poets, of the 20th century. It enables poets to compress a very complex idea or set of ideas into one image or even one word. It’s one of the most powerful devices that poets employ in creation.21.Modernism：It was a complex and diverse international movement in all the creative arts originating about the end of the 19th century. It provided the greatest creative renaissance of the 20th century. It was made up of many facets，such as symbolism，surrealism （超现实主义），cubism （立体主义），expressionism，futurism （未来主义），ect22American Dream:American dream means the belief that everyone can succeed as long as he/she works hard enough. It usually implies a successful and satisfying life. It usually framed in terms of American capitalism（资本主义）, its associated purported meritocracy,（知识界精华）and the freedoms guaranteed by the U.S. Bill of Rights. 23.The Harlem Renaissance：refers to the flowering of African American literature, art, and drama during the 1920s and 1930s. Though centered in Harlem, New York, the movement impacted urban centers throughout the United States. Black novelists, poets, painters, and playwrights began creating works rooted in their own culture instead of imitating the styles of Europeans and white American.24.free verse:: poetry without a fixed beat or regular rhyme scheme or line length and depends on natural speech rhythms, the ebb and flow or cadences of speech, and the counterpoint of stressed and unstressed syllables. In conventional verse the unit is the foot, or, perhaps, the line, while in free verse the unit is the stanza or strophe syllables. Fee verse is not written in definite stanzas. The great majority of his poems depends on parallelism and other reiterative devices for its structure and cadence. It is exactly as its name implies—free, free to wander the printed page that the poet’s will, free to create pictures in random order. Imagery is very important in free verse since the poem has to capture the reader’s imagination with words alone, unaided by these old favorite rhyme and meter.。
英美文学名词解释
1. Alliteration: repetition of the initial letter or first sound of several words, marking the stressed syllables in a line of poetry or prose. A simple example is the phrase “through thick and thin “. The device is used to emphasize meaning and thus can be effectively employed in oratory. Alliteration is a characteristic of Anglo-Saxon poetry, notably by the epic Beowulf; it is still used, with modifications, by modern poets.2. Ballad: A story told in verse and usually meant to be sung. In many countries, the folk ballad was one of the earliest forms of literature. Folk ballads have no known authors. They were transmitted orally from generation to generation and were not set down in writing until centuries after they were first sung. The subject matter of folk ballads stems from the everyday life of the common people. Devices commonly used in ballads are the refrain, incremental repetition, and code language. A later form of ballad is the literary ballad, which imitates the style of the folk ballad.3. Ballad stanza: A type of four-line stanza. The first and third lines have four stressed words or syllables; the second and fourth lines have three stresses. Ballad meter is usually iambic. The number of unstressed syllables in each line may vary. The second and fourth lines rhyme.4. Blank verse: Blank verse was first introduced by the Earl of Surrey in his translations of Books 2 and 4 of Virgil’s The Aeneid. It consists of lines of iambic pentameter (five-stress iambic verse) which are unrhymed—hence the term “blank”. Of all English metrical forms it is closest to the natural rhythms of English speech, and at the same time flexible and adaptive to diverse levels of discourse; as a result it has been more frequently and variously used than any other type of versification. It became the standard meter for Elizabethan and later poetic drama; a free form of blank verse is still the medium in twentieth-century verse plays.5. Bildungsroman: This is a term more or less synonymous with Erziehungsroman—literally an “upbringing” or “education” novel. Widely used by German critics, it refers to a novel which is an account of the youthful development of a hero or heroine (usually the former). It describes the processes by which maturity is achieved through the various ups and downs of life.6. Byronic hero: A stereotyped character created by Byron. This kind of hero is usually a proud, mysterious rebel figure of noble origin. With immense superiority in his passions and powers, he would carry on his shoulders the burden of righting all the wrongs in a corrupt society. He would rise single-handedly against any kind of tyrannical rules either in government, in religion, or in moral principles with unconquerable wills and inexhaustible energies. The conflict is usually one of rebellious individuals against outworn social systems and conventions.7. Classicism: A movement or tendency in art, literature, or music that reflects the principles manifested in the art of ancient Greece and Rome. Classicism emphasizes the traditional and the universal, and places value on reason, clarity, balance, and order. Classicism, with its concern for reason and universal themes, is traditionally opposed to Romanticism, which is concerned with emotions and personal themes.8. Critical Realism: The critical realism of the 19th century flourished in the fouties and in the beginning of fifties. The realists first and foremost set themselves the task of criticizing capitalist society from a democratic viewpoint and delineated the crying contradictions of bourgeois reality. But they did not find a way to eradicate social evils.9. Enlightenment: is a term used to describe the trends in thought and letters in Europe and the American colonies during the 18th century prior to the French revolution. The phrase was frequently employed by writers of the period itself, convinced that they were emerging from centuries of darkness and ignorance into a new age enlightened by reason, science, and a respect for humanity. The enlighteners believed in the power of reason, and that is why the 18th century in England has often been called “the age of reason “.10. Epic: A long narrative poem telling about the deeds of a great hero and reflecting the values of the society from which it originated. Many epics were drawn from an oral tradition and were transmitted by song and recitation before they were written down.13.Gothic novel: An alternative term is Gothic romance. It is a story of terror and suspense, usually set in a gloomyold castle or monastery. Following the appearance of Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764), the Gothic novel flourished in Britain from the 1790s to the 1820s, dominated by Ann Radcliffe, whose The Mysteries of Udolpho had many imitators.14、Humanism: Broadly, this term suggests any attitude, which tends to exalt the human element or stress the importance of human interests, as opposed to the supernatural, divine elements—or as opposed to the grosser, animal elements. In a more specific sense, humanism suggests a devotion to those studies supposed to promote human culture most effectively—in particular, those dealing with the life, thought, language and literature of ancient Greece and Rome. In literary history the most important use of the term is to designate the revival of classical culture that accompanied the Renaissance.15. heroic couplet: it is a term in poetry applied to two successive lines of verse that form a single unit because they rhyme. Couplets in English are usually written in 10-syllableslines, a form first used by Chaucer. This evolved into the so-called heroic-couplet popular in 17th and 18th century. The heroic couplet, two rhyming iambic pentameter lines, is also called a closed couplet because the meaning and the grammatical structure are couplet within two lines.16. Iambic pentameter: A poetic line consisting of five verse feet, with each foot an iamb—that is, an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable. Iambic pentameter is the most common verse line in English poetry.17. Local Colorism: Local Colorism or Regionalism as a trend first made its presence felt in the late 1860s and early seventies in America. It may be defined as the careful attegogoms in speech, dress or behavior peculiar to a geographical locality. The ultimate aim of the local colorists is to create the illusion of an indigenous little world with qualities that tell it apart from the world outside. The social and intellectual climate of the country provided a stimulating milieu for the growth of local color fiction in America. Local colorists concerned themselves with presenting and interpreting the local character of their regions. They tended to idealize and glorify, but they never forgot to keep an eye on the truthful color of local life. They formed an important part of the realistic movement. Although it lost its momentum toward the end of the 19th century, the local spirit continued to inspire and fertilize the imagination of author.18. Modernism: A general term applied retrospectively to the wide range of experimental and avant-garde trends in literature of the early 20th century, including Symbolism, Futurism, Expressionism, Imagism, V orticism, Dada, and Surrealism, along with the innovations of the unaffiliated writers. Modernism takes the irrational philosophy and the theory of psycho-analysis as its theoretical base. It is a reaction against realism. It rejects rationalism which is the theoretical base of realism; it excludes from its major concern the external, objective, material world, which is the only creative source of realism; by advocating a free experimentation on new forms and new techniques in literary creation, it casts away almost all the traditional elements in literature such as story, plot, character, chronological narration, etc., which are essential to realism. As a result, the works created by the modernist writers can often be labeled as anti-novel, anti-poetry or anti-drama.19.Naturalism: An extreme form of realism. Naturalistic writers usually depict the sordid side of life and show characters who are severely, if not hopelessly, limited by their environment or heredity.20. Neoclassicism: A revival in the 17th agogo of order, balance, and harmony in literature. Neoclassicism: A style of western literature that flourished from the mid-seventeenth century until the end of the eighteenth century and the rise of Romanticism. The neoclassicists looked to the great classical writers for inspiration and guidance, considering them to have mastered the noblest literary forms, tragic epic and the epic. Neoclassical writers shared several beliefs. They believed that literature should both instruct and delight, and the proper subject of art was humanity. Neoclassicism stressed rules, reason, harmony, balance, restraint, decorum, order, serenity, realism, and form---above all, an appeal to the intellect rather than emotion. The Restoration in 1660 marked the beginning of the neoclassical period in England, whose writers included John Dryden, Alexander Pope, Samuel Johnson, ect.21. Ode: A complex and often lengthy lyric poem, written in a dignified formal style on some lofty or serious subject. Odes are often written for a special occasion, to honor a person or a season or to commemorate an event. 22. Parallelism: (a figure of speech) The use of phrases, clauses, or sentences that are similar or complementary in structure or in meaning. Parallelism is a form of repetition.23. Pictorialism: It’s an important poetic device characterized by efforts to achieve striking visual effects. Among its features are irregularity of line, contrast or enchantment of light, color and image. Other means of pictorialism include personification, juxtaposition and the matching of colors with verbs of action.24. Pre-Romanticism: It originated among the conservative groups of men and letters as a reaction against Enlightenment and found its most manifest expression in the “Gothic novel”. The term arising from the fact that the greater part of such romances were devoted to the medieval times.25. Postmodernism: A term referring to certain radically experimental works of literature and art produced after World War II. Post-modernism is distinguished from modernism, which generally refers to the revolution in art and literature that occurred during the period 1910-1930, particularly following the disillusioning experience of World War I. Much of post-modernist writing reveals and highlights the alienation of individuals and the meaninglessness of human existence. Postmodernists break away from traditions through experimentation with new literary devices, forms, and styles.26. Psychological Realism: It is the realistic writing that probes deeply into the complexities of characters’ thoughts and motivations. Henry James is considered the founder of psychological realism. His novel The Ambassadors is considered to be a masterpiece of psychological realism.27. Realism: The attempt in literature and art to represent life as it really is, without sentimentalizing or idealizing it. Realistic writing often depicts the everyday life and speech of ordinary people. This has led, sometimes, to an emphasis on sordid details.28. Renaissance: in essence, was a historical period in which the European humanist thinkers and scholars made attempts to get rid of conservatism in feudalist Europe and introduce new ideas that expressed the interests of the rising bourgeoisie, to lift the restrictions in all areas placed by the roman church authorities..29. Romance: Any imagination literature that is set in an idealized world and that deals with a heroic adventures and battles between good characters and villains or monsters. 30 Romanticism: A movement that flourished in literature, philosophy, music, and art in Western culture during most of the 19th century, beginnigogom.31. Sentimentalism: Sentimentalism came into being as a result of a bitter discontent on the part of certain enlighteners in social reality.32. Sonnet: A fourteen-line lyric poem, usually written in rhymed iambic pentameter. A sonnet generally expressesa single theme or idea.33. Spenserian stanza: A nine-line stanza with the following rhyme scheme: ababbabcc. The first eight lines are written in iambic pentameter. The ninth line is written in iambic hexameter and is called an alexandrine.34. Stanza: It’s a structural division of a poem, consisting of a seri es of verse lines which usually comprise a recurring pattern of meter and thyme.35. Utilitarianism: this was a hedonistic kind of philosophy, embracing Utility, or “the greatest happiness for the greatest number”as the sanction of morality, and spreading the belief that everyone was the best judge of his own interest. Jeremy Bentham and James Mill set the tone, and John Stuart Mill humanized it sufficiently to ensure its dissemination in the country. As a practical movement of philosophy, it advocated a few things which met the need of the age. One of these was its emphasis on the importance of representative government, universal education, trade unions, and philanthropy. It encouraged individual growth and social reform, and supported democratic politics and material progress. Utilitarianism was on the whole the reflection of the spirit of Victorian middle class liberalism, or philistinism as Matthew Arnold called it. And it provoked a reaction from the major authors of the period such Tennyson and Dickens.。
福克纳作品
Artistic Techniques
Stream of consciousness The interior monologue: to explore the nature of human consciousness Yoknapatawpha county 约克纳帕塔法世 系 (Local Colorism 乡土文学) Multiple points of view Disruption of time sequence Symbolism and mythological and biblical allusion Technical experimentation
《修女安魂曲》（Requiem for a Nun）（1951） 1930年代中，为了赚钱他出版了低俗小说类型的《圣 殿》（Sanctuary）。其中邪恶、堕落腐败的主题（伴 随浓厚的南方哥特风格）在今日仍然影响着通俗文学。 此书续作《修女安魂曲》是他唯一出版的戏剧 《寓言》（A Fable ）（1954） 《掠夺者》（The Reivers）（1962）
Southern renaissance
It was the reinvigoration of American Southern literature that began in the 1920s and 1930s with the appearance of writers By 1920’s, a literary movement known as the Southern Renaissance emerged. There was a domination of southern literature for at least 4 decades in America literature.
美国文学名词解释
Calvinism (sometimes called the Reformed tradition, the Reformed faith, or Reformed theology) is a theological system and an approach to the Christian life that emphasizes the rule of God over all things. It bears the name of the French reformer John Calvin because of his prominent influence on it. The system is best known for its doctrines of predestination and total depravity.Romanticism occurred and developed in Europe and America at the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries under the historical background of the Industrial Revolution around 1760 and the French Revolution (1789 –1799). The term “Romantic”was first used by the German critic Friedrich Schlegel (1772 –1829) at the beginning of the 19th century. Romanticism marked the reaction in literature, philosophy, art, religion, and politics from the Neoclassicism and formal orthodoxy of the past.Characteristics:(1) Romanticism was a rebellion against the objectivity of rationalism.(2) Feelings, intuitions and emotions were more important than reason and common sense.(3) They stressed the close relationship between man and nature.(4) They emphasized individualism, placing the individual at the center of life and art.(5) They affirmed the inner life of the self, and wanted each person to be free to develop and express his own inner thoughts.(6) They cherished strong interest in the past, especially the medieval.(7) They were attracted by the wild, the irregular, the remote, the mysterious, and the strange. Gothic(8) Typical literary forms of romanticism include ballad, lyrics, sentimental comedy, novels, gothic romance, sonnet, and critical essays.Dark Romantics present individuals as prone to sin and self-destruction, not as inherently possessing divinity and wisdom. For these Dark Romantics, the natural world is dark, decaying, and mysterious; when it does reveal truth to man, its revelations are evil and hellish. Finally, whereas Transcendentalists advocate social reform when appropriate, works of Dark Romanticism frequently show individuals failing in their attempts to make changes for the better. American writers Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville are the major Dark Romantic authorsTranscendentalism:This movement refers to the New England literary movement which flourished from 1835 to 1860. It started with the meetings of a small group of eminent writers and scholars who came together in a town called Concord to discuss the new thought of the time. Though they held different opinions about many issues, they seemed to generally agree that within the nature of man there was an intuitive and personal revelation that can transcend human experience. They became known as the Transcendental Club. Members of the Club included Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803 –1882), Henry David Thoreau (1817 –1862), Margaret Fuller and Nathaniel Hawthorne. As the movement developed, it sponsored two important activities: the publication of a magazine The Dial and the organization of Brook Farm. It had a considerable influence on American art and literature. Key statements of its doctrine include Emerson’s nature, The American Scholar, the Divinity School Address, and Self-Reliance and also Thoreau’s Walden.1.It stressed the power of intuition, believing that people could learn things both from the outside world by means of five senses and from the inner world by intuition. But the things they learned from within were truer than the things they learned from without, and transcend them. It held that everyone had access to a source of knowledge that transcend everyday experiences. Intuition was the inner light.2. as romantic idealism, it placed spirit first and matter second. It believed that both spirit and matter were real but that the reality of spirit was greater than that of matter. Spirit transcend reality.3. it took nature as symbolic of God. All things in nature were symbols of god’s presnece. Nature was alive. Everything in the universe was viewed as an expression of the divine spirit. Therefore, nature could exercise a healthy and restorative influence on human mind. People should come close to nature for instructions.4. It emphasized the significance of the individual and believed that the individual was the most important element in society and that the ideal kind of individual was self-reliant and unselfish. People should depend on themselves for spiritual perfection. With the innate goodness of humanity, it held that the individual soul could reach God without the help of churches or clergy.5. Emerson envisioned religion as an emotional communication between an individual soul and the universal “Oversoul”. The “Oversoul”was all pervading unitary spiritual power of goodness, omnipresent and omnipotent, from which all things came and of which everyone was a part. Generally, the Oversoul was a single essence, and since all people derived their beings from the same source, the seeming diversity and clash of human interests was only superficial, and all people were in reality striving toward the same ends by difference paths.6. it held that commerce was degrading and that a life spent in business was a wasted life. Humanity could be much better off if they paid less attention to the mateiral world in which they lvied.Realism was originated in France, a literary doctrine that called for “reality and truth”in the depiction of ordinary life. It soon spread to other countries in Europe. Zola, Flaubert, Balzac, Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky were among the outstanding representatives.1. verisimitude of detail derived from observation;2. a reliance on the representative in plot, setting and character;3. an objective rather than an idealized view of human nature and experience;4. Focus on the commonness of lives of the common people;5. interest in the problems of the individual conscience in conflict with social institution.Local color fiction“exploits the speech, dress, mannerism, habits of thought, and topography peculiar to a certain region. Of course, all fiction has a locale, but local writing exists primarily for the portrayal of the people and life of a geographical setting.”Local color fiction has “such a quality of texture and background that it could not have been written in any other place or by anyone else that a native.”(Texture refers to the elements which characterize a local culture such as speech, customs dress etc. Background covers physical setting and those distinctive qualities of landscape which condition human thought and behavior.)Local color writing was a form of regionalism popular after the Civil War. Local colorism as a trend became dominant in American literature in the late 1860s and early 1870s. At that time, thewestward expansion was still going on, and people realized marked differences in different parts of their identity and seek understanding and recognition by showing their local color. What was more, after the civil war, a lot of magazines appeared and provided opportunities for local colorists to write about their parts of the United States. The representative authors were Mark Twain, Hamlin Garland, Francis Bret Harte, Harriet Beecher Stowe.1.Local color fiction presents a locale which is distinguished from the outside world. Local colorists concern themselves with portraying and interpreting the local character of their particular region.2.Local color fiction is marked by an attempt at accurate dialect reporting, a tendency toward the use of eccentrics as characters, and the use of sentimental pathos.3. local color fiction glorifies the past. The writers are nostalgic about the past, about the old, agrarian way of life that was passing away.4. Local color fiction stresses the influence of setting on character. The local color writers set out with a thesis that in each region of the country, the setting is different, and therefore the people behave differently. They have different qualities.Naturalism is a new and harsher realism. It develops on the basis of realism but goes a step further in portraying social reality. Under the influence of Charles Darwin’s evolution theory and Herbert Spencer’s application of Darwin’s theory in the social relations, naturalists are especially concerned with how human beings strive to find meaning in their experiences, how people fight against environment and other external forces, and what elements make people who and what they are.Thematically, naturalistic writers write detailed descriptions of the lives of the lower class. They are interested in finding out how men and women are overwhelmed by the forces of environment and by the forces of heredity. The gloomy and pessimistic atmosphere in many naturalistic writings makes naturalism more naked and wicked than realism when representing social reality. Naturalists hold that since man is governed by his instincts and desires, he has no free will to control his fate. So naturalist writers do not attempt to make moral judgments.The novel of manners is a literary genre that deals with aspects of behavior, language, customs and values characteristic of a particular class of people in a specific historical context. The genre emerged during the final decades of the 18th century. The novel of manners often shows a conflict between individual aspirations or desires and the accepted social codes of behavior. There is a vital relationship between manners, social behavior and character. Physical appearances are overall less emphasized while manners and social behavior remain the particular interests in the novel. The idea of manners assumes not only a social significance, as it is applied today, but a moral one as well, which preceded the social context in which it was used. What connects the two is the idea of "pleasing". Characters in the novels are not always morally and socially obliging to each other, however, but there is differentiation between the upstanding hero or heroine and the socially less acceptable characters. The different degrees of how the characters uphold the standard level of social etiquette is what usually dominates the plot of the novel.Modernism is an omnibus(综合的;包括多项的) term for a number of tendencies in the artswhich were prominent in the first half of the 20th c.;In English literature it is particularly associated with the writings of T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, W. B. Yeats, F. M. Ford and Joseph Conrad.1.marked by a persistent experimentalism2.rejected the traditional framework of narrative, description, and rational exposition in poetry and prose3.in favor of stream-of-consciousness presentation of personality4.a dependence on the poetic image as the essential vehicle of aesthetic communication, and upon myth as a characteristic structural principle.Stream of Consciousness was a literary technique in which a character's thoughts are presented in the confusing, jumbled, and inconsequential manner of real life without any clarification by the author. It's best known writers are Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, and James Joyce.Stream of consciousness(意识流)(or interior monologue);In literary criticism, Stream of consciousness denotes a literary technique which seeks to describe an individual’s point of view by giving the written equivalent of the character’s thought processes. Stream of consciousness writing is strongly associated with the modernist movement. Its introduction in the literary context, transferred from psychology, is attributed to May Sinclair. Stream of consciousness writing is usually regarded as a special form of interior monologue and is characterized by associative leaps in syntax and punctuation that can make the prose difficult to follow,tracing as they do a character’s fragmentary thoughts and sensory feelings.famous writers to employ this technique in the english language include James Joyce and William Faulkner.The Lost Generations:This is a term applied to the disillusioned intellectuals of the years following the First World War, who rebelled against former ideals and values, but could replace them only by despair or a cynical hedonism. They became expatriates, living in European cities such as London and Paris, standing aside and writing about what they saw –the failures of the American society. They believed that the American bourgeois society was hypocritical, vulgar and crude, concerning only with making money. It was a society where individual thought and individual expression were crushed. These intellectuals include F. Scott Fitzgerald, Earnest Hemingway, Sinclair Lewis, Sherwood Anderson etc. The term came from Gertrude Stein’s comment on Hemingway, “You are all a lost generation.”Harlem Renaissance was a term to describe the revival of the literary and artistic achievement in the 1920s by Afro-American writers. The writers who were associated with Harlem Renaissance include Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, Sterling Brown, Jessie Fauset, Wallace Thurman, James Weldon Johnson, and Marcus Garvey. Their artistic endeavor paved the way to the later black writers, including Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Gwendolyn Brooks, James Baldwin, Alex Haley, Alice Walker, and Toni Morrison.Modernism:Modernism was an international literary and artistic movement which originated in Europe andlater spread to other parts of the world. It gained expression in many related fields of art, such as painting (Pablo Picasso, Juan Gris, George Braque, Marcel Duchamp and other painters associated with Dadaism), music (Igor Stravinsky), fiction (James Joyce, Virginia Woolfe, Marcel Proust, Thomas Mann) and poetry (William Butler Yeats)American literature and art at the beginning of 20th century were in this trend. Writers, artists and architects adopted “a variety of avant-guarde doctrines so revolutionary as to exhaust the traditional vocabulary of the arts and require the creation of new descriptive terms: futurism, expressionism, post-modernism, Dadaism, imagism and surrealism. By 1920s, modernism became part of everyday vocabulary of the Americans.Many modernistic writers believe that “the previously sustaining structures of human life … had been either destroyed or shown up as falsehood or fantasies.” The subject matter of a modernistic writing often became the work itself since the writer was obsessed with the interrelation between literature and life. Fragments and framentation dominated human experience as well as artistic writing. No matter what modernistic techniques were employed, the search for meaning –the meaning of life, the meaning of literature – remained the ultimate purpose of many modernistic writers.Imagism:The Imagism Movement began in London and later spread to the US. It flourished from 1909 to 1917. Poetry, a magazine of verse, founded in Chicago by Harriet Monroe in 1912, became the chief carrier of Imagist poems. It provided a channel for young poets to publish their experimental verses.Imagism underwent three major phases in its development.1. 1908 – 1909An Englsihman, T.E Hulme, founded a Poet’s Club in 1908, which met in Soho every Wednesday evening to discuss poetry. He believed that the most effective means to express the momentary impression is through “the use of one dominant image”. The image must enable one “to dwell and linger upon a point of excitement, to achieve the impossible and convert a point into a line.2. 1912 – 1914Ezra Pound took over the movement. He defined image as “that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time.” In 1912, he with some other poets published a collection of poems, entitled Des Imagistes. It is regarded as the manifeto of Imagism. In included three principles.a.Direct treatment of the “thing”, whether subjective or objective;b.To use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation;c.As regarding rhythm, to compose in the sequence of musical phrase, not in the sequence of ametronome.3. 1914 – 1917Amy Lowell took over the movement and developed it into “Amygism.”In 1915 -17, three volumns of some Imagist Poets came out, containing six principles of poetic composition.An outstanding representative of Imagist poems is Ezra Pound’s ine poem, “In a Station of the Metro”, William Carlos Williams “The Red Wheelburrow”’ and Amy Lowell’s “Wind and Silver”, etc.1920s1.Industrialization and urbanization:2.Women’s Liberation3.DisillusionmentThe most notable writers of the time:Sinclair Lewis: Main Street (1920)Sherwood Anderson Winesburg, Ohio (1919), Death in the Woods (1933)Earnest Heminway:F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Great Gatsby (1925)T.S. Eliot: The Wasteland (1922)1930s1.The Great Depression2.The New DealThe most notable writers of the time:John Steinbeck(1902 – 1968): Of Mice and Men (1937), The Grapes of Wrath (1939)John Dos Passos (1896 – 1970): U. S. A.(triology 1939 – 1936)William Faulkner (1897 -1962): The Sound and FuryRichard Wright (1908 – 1960): Native Son (1940)Eugene O’Neill (1888 – 1953)Dada or Dadaism（达达主义):a cultural movement that began in Zürich, Switzerland, during World War I and peaked from 1916 to 1922.a group of artists assembled in Zürich in 1916, wanting a name for their new movement, chose it at random by stabbing a French-German dictionary with a paper knife, and picking the name that the point landed upon. Dada in French is a child's word for hobby-horse.Anti-warReject reason and logicembrace chaos and irrationalityAnti-artHope to destroy traditional culture and aestheticsExistentialism is a term applied to the work of a number of 19th- and 20th-century philosophers who generally held that the focus of philosophical thought should be to deal with the conditions of existence of the individual person and their emotions, actions, responsibilities, and thoughts. The early 19th century philosopher Søren Kierkegaard(克尔凯郭尔) , posthumously regarded as the father of existentialism, maintained that the individual is solely responsible for giving their own life meaning and for living that life passionately and sincerely, in spite of many existential obstacles and distractions including despair, angst, absurdity, alienation, and boredom.Expressionism （表现主义): a cultural movement, initially in poetry and painting, originating in Germany at the start of the 20th century.Expressionism emerged as an 'avant-garde movement' in poetry and painting before the FirstWorld Warits popularity peak in Berlin, during the 1920s.Expressionism is exhibited in many art forms, including: painting, literature, theatre, dance, film, architecture and music.1.bold colours, distorted forms, two-dimensional, without perspective2.present the world under an utterly subjective perspective3.violently distorting it to obtain an emotional effect and vividly transmit personal moods and ideas.4.Expressionist artists sought to express the meaning of "being alive"and emotional experience rather than physical reality.multiple points of view（多视角）：Multiple Point of View: It is one of the literary techniques William Faulkner used, which shows within the same story how the characters reacted differently to the same person or the same situation. The use of this technique gave the story a circular form wherein one event was the center, with various points of view radiating from it. The multiple points of view technique makes the reader recognize the difficulty of arriving at a true judgment.Confessional poetry ：Confessional poetry emphasizes the intimate, and sometimes unflattering, information about details of the poet's personal life, such as in poems about illness, sexuality, and despondence. The confessionalist label was applied to a number of poets of the 1950s and 1960s. John Berryman, Allen Ginsberg, Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, Theodore Roethke, Anne Sexton, and William De Witt Snodgrass have all been called 'Confessional Poets'. As fresh and different as the work of these poets appeared at the time, it is also true that several poets prominent in the canon of Western literature, perhaps most notably Sextus Propertius and Petrarch, could easily share the label of "confessional" with the confessional poets of the fifties and sixties.A J azz age(爵士时代):The Jazz Age describes the period of the 1920s and 1930s, the years between world war I and world war II. Particularly in north America. With the rise of the great depression, the values of this age saw much decline. Perhaps the most representative literary work of the age is American writer Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. Highlighting what some describe as the decadence and hedonism, as well as the growth of individualism. Fitzgerald is largely credited with coining the term” Jazz Age”.The Beat Generation(垮掉的一代):The members of The Beat Generation were new bohemian libertines. Who engaged in a spontaneous, sometimes messy, creativity.2> The Beat writers produced a body of written work controversial both for its advocacy of non-conformity and for its non-conforming style.3> the major beat writings are Allen Ginsberg’s howl.Howl became the manifesto of The Beat Generation。
马克吐温的写作风格
The language styles in the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn The adventure of Huckleberry Finn is the best work that Mark Twain ever produced in the early time. It tell a story about the united states before the civil war.At that time America had great national faults,full of violence and even crueltly ,yet still retain the virtues of ‘some simplicity ,some innocence ,and some peace .Mark Twain used his speacial language to descipe the society along the mississipp river and revealed peaple kean to the freedom and happiness .In this book colloquial language and staire are very significant ,through which Mark Twain descripe the character ,narrate the event ,and creat the memorable characters in all of American fiction .Mark Twain was the first important writer t o consistently use the American speech rather than England’s English. His honor, whether it was aimed at pure entertainment or at social satire, was irresistible. His realism, and details influenced many later American novelists. That was why Ernest Hemingway once said “all modern American literatures came from one book written by Mark Twain called The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.” And it became Twain’s masterpiece.Huckleberry Finn is a veritable recreation of living models. The two major characters, Huck and Jim, represent the two sides of the dilemma: Huck strikes out for an absolute freedom, while Jim requires to gain his own freedom,so Huck qualify his freedom by entering into the pursuit ofJim’s. It starts out as a comedy , an ‘As You Like It’ wit h a hero drawn from the bottom of society rather than the top. The portrayal of individual incidents and characters achieved intense verisimilitude of detail. Serious problems are being discussed through the narration of a little illiterate boy. The fact that the wilderness juxtaposed with civilization, the people half wild and half civilized, many of whom are worse, vulgar, are brutal. travels. In this novel, rivers are roads that move,and the road itself is the greatest character in this novel of the road. T he hero’s departures from the river and his returns to it compose a significant pattern. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn shows us the major achievements of his art: the masterful use of dialects; humor and pathos, innocence and evil. This nove create the most memorable characters in all of American fiction.I Use of Colloquial LanguageThe book is written in a colloquial style, in the general standard speech of uneducated Americans. Moreover, the prose of Huckleberry Finn established the prose virtues of American colloquial speech. It has something to do with ease and freedom in the use of language. Most of all, it has to do with the structure of the sentence, which is simple, direct, and fluent, maintaining the rhythm of the word’s group of speech and the intonations of the speaking voice. Mark Twain’s colloquial style has influenced a large number of American writers.1.1Vernacular languageIt is not grand pompous ,but simple ,direct lucid ,and faithful to the colloquial speech.Speaking in vernacular ,a wild and uneducated Huck ,running away from civilization for his freedom ,is vividly brought to life .The great strength of the book also comes from the shape given to by the course of the raft’sjourney down the Mississippi as Huck and Jim seek their kinds of freedom . Mark Twain wrote in his unpretentious, colloquial, and poetic style. He used vernacular language, dialect with spelling representing pronunciation. Part of this comes from his interest in humor. The directness of the language is a very influential point in Twain’s style.Mark Twain said, “I use dialect stuff by talking and talking it till it sounds right.” He wanted his writing to have the sound of easy-going speech. In Huckleberry Finn the fountainhead of the American colloquial prose, he wrote seven different dialects and each can be distinguished. If the reader is a linguist, he can examine the different pronunciations that Twain has shown. In his own time, dialect writing was considered humorous. People got a big laugh out of reading these misspell words. Another feature of the book, which helps to make it famous is its language. The book is written in the colloquial style in the general standard speech of uneducated Americans.. Mark Twain’s introductory note on accents is an indication of his conscious attempt to achieve accurate detail. “In this book,” he says, “a number ofdialects are used, to wit: the Missouri Negro dialect; the extreme forms of the backwoods southwestern dialect; the ordinary ‘pike country’ dialect; and four modified varieties of this last. The shadings have not been done in a haphazard fashion, or by guesswork; but painstakingly, and with the trustworthy guidance and support of personal familiarity, with these several forms of speech.” “Painstaking ” and “not haphaza rd,” though they possess a humorous ring, denote the conscientious effort on the part of the author, and trustworthiness and familiarity and the author’s awareness of dialects in using which reveal his attempt to reproduce actual daily speech with a degree of accuracy.A recent and very influential recasting of Huck’s vernacular voice has identified.We may quote a passage from this masterpiece as an illustration:“I took the sack of corn meal and took it to where the canoe was hid, and shoved the vines and branches apart and put it in; then I done the same with the side of bacon; then the whisky-jug. I took all the coffee and sugar there was, and all the ammunition; I took the wadding; I took the bucket and gourd; took a dipper and a tin cup, and my old son and two blankets, and the skillet and the coffee-pot/ I took fish lines and matches and other things- everything that was worth a cent. I cleaned out the place I wanted an ax, but there wasn’t any, only the one outat woodpile, and I know why I was going to leave that. I fetched out the gun, and now I was done.”The words used here are, perhaps “ammunition” which is etymologically French, mostly Anglo-Saxon in origin, and are short, concrete and direct in effect. Sentence structures are most of them si mple or compound, with a series of “then” and “ands” and semi-colons serving as connectives. The repetition of the word “took” and the stringing together of things leave the impression that Mark Twain depend solely on the concrete object and action for the body and movement of his prose. What is more, there is an ungrammatical element, which gives the final finish to his style. The whole book approximates the actual speech habit of an uneducated boy from south American of the mid-nineteenth century.The vernacular language in the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn initiated the new style of language in American novels, and has had significant influence upon American writers of later generations. 1.2 Local ColorTwain is also known as a local colorist ,who preferred to present social life through portraits of the local character of his regions ,in cluding peaple living in that area ,the landscape ,and other peculiarities like the customs ,dialects ,costumes and so on .Twain refers to the elements,which characterize a local culture, such as speech, customs, and also a particular place. Local colorists concerned themselves with presenting and interpreting the local character of their regions. They tended to identify and glorify, but they never forgot to keep an eye on the truthful color of local life.Twain depicted social life through descriptions of local places and people he knew best and believed that “the most valuable capital, or culture, or education usable in the building of novels is personal experience.” Y et, sometimes Twain wrote a sentimental story, not because he was sentimental, but because he wanted to show the reader how stupid such a story really was. The reader has to be very careful when he or she reads Mark Twain. Twain often played trick on the reader. He often said things when he meant just the opposite. This is the irony that he got the humor from the Far West. He would do things that he did just to make fun , but the reader might think that he really meant it. Then the reader was the tender-foot who taken in .Mark twain preferred to respect social life through portraits of local places which he knew best and drew heavily from his own rich fund of knowledge of people and places. The Adventures of huckleberry Finn is one such example. Finn is living breathing personality. It is through his use of language and his activities that Twain creates character and sets down objective truth: Finn is uneducated; he dislikes civilized waysbecause they are restrictive and hypocritical he thinks. Meanwhile, local color mixed romantic plots with realistic descriptions of things which were readily observed, with the customs , dialects, sights, smell and sounds of regional America. After the Civil war, local color had further developed, In this book, this kind of literature mainly describes the local life, the keynote was optimistic, and the language was narrative humorous. The characters he created were humorous and full of wittiness. From my point of view, American literature is so charming for this kind of works.Mark Twain use Local colorism to make Sherborn a cold-blooded killer and Huck a saint (and Tom a good). Let me repeat it as a saint，however, Huck is no more bent on social reform, no more optimistic about it, than is sherburn. So local colorism is a variation of American realism, and also a description of a small refined region. Twain, breaking out of the narrow limits of local-color fiction, described the breadth of American experience as no one had ever done before, or since, and he created The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, a masterpiece of American realism that proverbs to be one of the great books of world literature.1.3 humorMark Twain’s humor is remarkable ,too.It is fun to read Twain’works,for most of his works tend to be fuuny ,containing some ptactical joks ,comic details ,witty remarks ,etc.,and some of them areactually tall tales.Throughout all of Twain’s writing, we see the conflict between the ideals of Americans and their desire for money. But Twain never tried to solve the conflict. He is like a newspaperman who reports what he sees. In this situation, his humor was often rather childish. This may be spoken why the critic P. Abel said:” Twain was a boy and an old man, but never was he a man.”In The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, we can find many words and phrases that were used vividly to describe the things that happened, such as ‘I went along slow then, and I wasn’t right down certain whether I was glad I started or whether I wasn’t. This sentence is very interesting;humor is used t o express the author’s mood at that moment. We can also use another kind of language to replace the original, but the effect is so different. So we can conclude that humor played an important role in this novel.II. Satire in The Adventures of Huckleberry FinnSatire is a way of criticizing people or ideas in a humorous way to show that they have faults or are wrong, or a piece of writing or play, which uses this style. In The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Twain shows satire on southern culture before the civil war, when the Mississippi valley was still being settled. Twain blended two different subjects, the experience of westward expansion and the experience of southern slavery. And he wrote about both regains of the country. His attitudestoward the south were much less pleasant than his attitudes toward the west, because he confronted the south problem of slave of mistreatment of humans by humans. Through the change of the white boy Huck’s attitude toward Jim, a runaway black slave, Twain condemned racial discrimination. Twain made fun of typical American values, yet underneath he felt a brooding pessimism not only about American valuable but also about life itself.It was a dreadful thing to see Human beings be awful cruel to one another. Due to Twain’s own experience, satire is successfully used in this novel. There’s one significant scene which should be remembered, Huck Finn witnesses many instances of cruelty, brutality and hypocrisy in the township along the river Here are four points about his satire in this novel.2.1 VanityVanity in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn has a perfect embodiment. Twain viewed the poor whites and showed the reader how these no-count whites thought they were better than black slaves. Many share-coppers just able to make enough money to live for these sorts of illusions. Vanity was the only thing that kept them above the slaves. Their standard of living in many cases was beneath that of slaves. The only thing that made them feel good about themselves was that they were white. And Twain made the reader laugh at the ludicrous idea that they were held. For HuckFinn, the journey on the raft with Jim was a voyage of moral discovery. At the early stage, Huck Finn looks upon Jim as a Negro slave with a common attitude. However, as they progress down the river, he changes his mind and no longer has prejudice against black people. He gradually comes to see Jim as a human being and begins to accept him as his friend. Yet Huck Finn never fully succeeds in breaking free from the prevailing attitude towards Negroes. As for this part, it’s a large contrast to the other people. Huck Finn rebels against the atrocious king and duke. He is disgusted with their trifling with human beings.It is because that Huck Finn is such a good and noble person that his moral dilemma in helping a Negro slave to escape constitutes a profound condemnation of the way of life and moral values of American south. His conscience has been formed by the morality of St. Petersburg and he never quite succeeds in freeing himself from that society’s corrupt standards. Huck Finn’s formed conscience is the measure of the moral corruption of the community that shaped. So he sinks into an inner struggle. He becomes increasingly caught between his friendship with Jim and the common social standards.Compare with others, Huck Finn’s goodness is always unconscious and spontaneous, arising out of the deepest recesses of his nature. He abuse cares about the welfare of others and cannot bear to see anyone suffer. He shows sympathy for the nicest of Peter Wilks and saves money for them.So the opposite character embodies vanity has come into the stage. Here humor is replaced by satire and vanity is the embodiment of the satire.2.2. Unquestioning Acceptance of ViolenceThe second object of satire is the genteel upper-class southerner. The genteel upper-class southerners don’t understand themselves, either. They lived a aristocratic life. In the novel, Granger fords are violent and hateful toward other people. Out of senseless perversion of a code of “honor”, they are involved in a feud, one that has been going on for generations with the shepherd sons. Its cause has been forgotten. Every Sunday, the shepherd sons and the Grange fords go to the same church. The shepherd sons sit on one side of their guns against the wall. And they listen to the preacher talking about brotherly love. When the sermon is over, they pick up their guns and they keep an eye on each other as they walk out the door so they will not get shot in the back. The satire is merciless, not only because these people are violent, but because they accept their violence as right. No one wants to reform. Huck keeps asking “Why?” It is just the way life is. This unquestioning acceptance of violence is the reason why Twain condemned southern society.The destruction and tyranny of Huck Finn’s father are other reasons for his escaping and desiring to be free. Huck Finn’s father is a part of that societ against Huck Finn’s wishes. In contract to Miss Watson’s hypocrisy, his father presents the brutality and severity ofcivilization that threaten to destroy Huck Finn. His father believes that money and education are all the things of that time. Huck didn’t accept the violence from his father. Huck Finn’s freedom is modified by the presence of his father’s actions. Living in the woods, his father beats him quite frequently and sometimes leaves him locked up in the cabin for a long time. Once when his father returns from town, he is so drunk that he almost kills him. Huck Finn is mature enough to recognize the danger and only when he becomes convinced that his father represents immediate threat to his life does he decide to escape. Throughout his life plans to escape Huck Finn is more concerned for his life than anything else and prefers simply to disappear and begin a new life.Huck Finn’s desire to be free, at it’s deepest levels, and explores the possibility of an individual achieving true freedom in society. He is constantly forced to flee from a civilized society in order to preserve his sense of integrity and identity. It’s only when he is on the river in the group with Jim that flees secure and nature. Having escaped from the feud, he remarks that there is no home like raft and other places seem to be cramped up and smothery but a raft is. And he feels free and easy and comfortable very much on a raft. It is striking that whenever, Huck Finn comes into contact with the people along the river and he is forced to assume a false identity. His initial escapes from his own cruel father and the society of St. Perterburry forces him to feign his owndeath. This is the way that Huck chose to the problem: violence.2.3 CowardThe violence on which southern culture rests is a pretence or illusion to disguise the basic cowardliness of the people and their refusal to act as individuals. Twain felt it even more deeply. People are violent, in Twain’s view, because they are cowards. Things are all mixed up in southern society, in any society, based on violence. It is a society without a leade r. Twain’s attack on these people is bitter.In the middle part of this novel, the king and the duke were seriously evil; indeed, the long wilks episode is not funny. Had a lawyer Levi Bell, a precursor of Puddn’s head Wilson, not intervened, the outcome would have been dark in the measure of sherburn; in sherburn’s world there are no good people to be ruined. In Wilkses’ world, however, the good people are so powerless as the coward in Brecksville. The hopeless lambs offer no hope of betterment; they only measure its absence. Huck and Jim had left St. Petersburg with high hopes of freedom that are badly set back at cairo. The Willks episode ends in the utter defeat of these hopes. There seems to be no way to escape the duke and the king.It is on the very verge of the collapse of all possibility of freedom that Huck places his highest bid for it. Indeed, Jim has already been recaptures when Huck finds himself at last making the decision Twain had not been able to make at Cairo: “It was a close place,” he r ealizes,“I was a trembling, because I’d got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knew it. I study a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself:’ All right, then, I’ll go to hell.’” Let us say the obvious: Twain has chosen the rout e of social engagement when it’s too late in the story to take it. Huck has decided when he is willing to go to hell, but the harder decision was whether to go to Ohio. All in all, Huck is not a coward, those people who want to use violence to attack others can be called coward. During that years, the whole American society upheavaled strongly, and this novel deeply depicted the experience of this kind of person, under Mark Twain’s writing, coward is so vivid to embody the features of that age.We can pay more attention on sherburn, a merchant and a military man, a double pillar of society—but in a society that does not deserve to be supported. On the contrary, it merits being brought crashing down, for all the reasons Huck has been exposing through the incidents of his journey. This is not a deformable society; one can only curse it and leave. Sherburn curse it and stays, and Twain finds himself approving the cursing and not knowing what to think of the staying. Does he see something of his own situation in Sherburn furious isolation among idiots and knaves? Sherburn, moreover, is not merely an inhabitant of society; as storekeeper and military man, he is presuming ably one of those who shape it. In Huck, Twain depicts on the contrary someone who has no powerat all. Homeless and no money soon became an orphan. The real questions were not whether he will leave society but whether he will enter it and to what end? From his onto logical distance, Huck looks at the world of men with natural detachment. At his mos t critical he feels “ashamed of the human race”. Instead, sherburn sets about shaming the damned human race, hating its inescapable presence. The murder of Boggs, who is the lowest representation of humanity in sherburn’s eyes, expresses that hatred: he te lls Boggs to be gone, but Boggs stays and sherburn can’t stand his presence another moment. What sherburn cannot do is himself leave, so as to be, like Huck, peacefully and even compassionately ashamed of the human race.2.4 SlaveAfter reading this novel, this book has been brought to my attention by a surprising assortment of people: blacks and whites. At that time, blacks played a role of slave. The common element in this encounter has not been the kind of people making statements, nor shared opinions or political perspectives, nor even their assessments of the article. Rather, they have been united by a virtually uniform structure in their narratives. Sometimes these persons report their own experience of reading the essay, and sometimes they describe the experience of one of their students. The reader likes the essay but feels troubled about this, not knowing whether the author is black. Uneducated black slave namedJim, the book relates the story of the escape of Jim from slavery and, more important, how Huck Finn, floating along with him and helping him as best as he could, changes his mind, his prejudice about black people, and comes to accept Jim as a man and as a close friend as well. Meanwhile, Jim is very kindhearted. All of Huck’s virtues come from his good heart and his sense of humanity, for most of the things he was taught turned out to be wrong; for example, he was taught that slavery was good and right, and that runaway slaves should be reported, so what Huck has got to do is to cut through social prejudices and social discriminations to find truth for himself. Huck starts believing that blacks are by nature lower than whites-inferior animals of sorts in fact. Through their escape down the river, he gets to know Jim better and becomes more and more convinced that he is not only a man, but also a good man. Thus he ends up by accepting him not merely as a human being but also as a loyal friend. IIIA Combination of Colloquial Language and SatireThe Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is an outstanding novel; one of the most successful writing styles is a combination of colloquial language and satire. In fact, most of Twain’s works are the combination of both colloquial language and satire, but The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was a case in point. On the other hand, the novel also can be eyed as a satire on sentimentality and Romanticism . We have ever seen colloquial language and satire in some works, but no one’s writing is so appropriatelike Twain’s. It displays American culture out of the o rdinary and the attitude toward the entire society. In this book, the author use the first character to narrate, meanwhile colloquial language as the main writing language has come into the stage.In order to have the effect on vivid writing, satire is come out .VConclusionMark Twain usually wrote about his own personal experiences and things he knew about from firsthand experiences. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is Twain’s best book,and get the highest artistic degree . Most of all, it has to do with the structure of the sentence, which is simple, direct, and fluent, maintaining the rhythm of the word’s group of speech and the intonations of the speaking voice. Mark Twain’s colloquial style has influenced a large number of American writers. Twain depicted mostly the lower class of society. Meanwhile, local color mixed romantic plots with realistic descriptions of things which were readily observed, i.e. with the customs, dialects, sights, smell and sounds of regional America. Twain shows satire on southern culture before the civil war,especially reveal the southern slavery. His contribution to the development of realism and to American literature as a whole was partly through his colloquialism and satire. In this novel,Colloquial language and satire are so important but one of the most successful writing styles is a combination of colloquial language and satire,which displays the UnitedStates before the civil war and the southern slavery’s cruelty .Through his special language we can deeply understand the novel’s background, what sociey the novel reveal and author’s opinion about it.[1] Baym： Nina The Norton Anthology of American Literature, W.W. Norton & Company, Inc, 1998[2] Forrest G. Robinson：The Cambridge Companion To Mark Twain，Shanghai Foreign Language Education Press[3] Rubinstein, Annette. American Literature Root and Flower.Foreigh Language Teaching and Research Press, 1980[4] The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Foreigh Language Teachingand Research Press,2008[5] Wu Weiren：History and Anthology of American LiteratureVol.2,2006[6] 张奎武：《英美概况（第三版，下）》，吉林科学技术出版社，2000[7] 常耀信：《美国文学简史》, 天津:南开大学出版社,2004[8] 王变琴：《马克吐温短篇小说的讽刺艺术》， 2005年第73期。
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Stories of local colorism have a quality of circumstantial authenticity, as local colorists tried to immortalize the distinctive natural, social, and linguistic features. They are strong sketches of an environment. Local color fiction relies on simplicity for its greatest effect. It is characterictic of vernacular language and satirical humor.
Local color fiction “ expoits the speech, dress, mannerisms, habits of thoughts, and topography peculiar to a certain region. Of course, all fiction has a locale, but local color writing exists primarily for the portrayal of the people and life of a geographical setting”. The lo ca l co lo r w r it in g wa s a fo r m o f regionalism popular after the Civil War. Local colorism as a trend became dominant in American literature in the late 1860s and 1870s.
3. Local color fiction glorifies the past. The writers are nostalgic about the past as they are really trying to describe things that would be lost.
4. Local color fiction stresses the influence of setting on character. The local color writers set out with a thesis that in each region of the country, the setting is different, and therefore the people behave differently.
Basic Features 1. Local color fiction presents a localside world.
2. Local color fiction describes the exotic and the picturesque. It describes things that are not common in other regions.