英美文学选读美国2.The Realistic Period

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●The Realistic Period

1. What is local colorism in American literature?

A. Mark Twain, Sarah Orne Jewett and Joseph Kirkland are the representative of local colorists whose writings are concerned with the life of a small, well defined region or province. The characteristic setting is the isolated small town.

B. These local colorists, especially Mark Twain, preferred to present social life through portraits of the local characters of his regions, including people living in that area, the landscape, and other peculiarities like the customs, dialects, costumes and so on.

C. This particular concern about the local character of a region came about as "local colorism", a unique variation of American literary realism.

2. The literary school of naturalism was quite popular in the late 19th century. What are the major characteristics of naturalism?

A. Strongly influenced by social Darwinism, naturalism emphasizes t和determining power of the crushing forces of environment and heredity.

B. Being devoid of the freedom of choice and incapable of shaping their own destinies, men and women are helpless and insignificant in a cold and indifferent world.

C. The naturalistic writers reported truthfully and objectively, with a passion for scientific accuracy and overwhelming accumulation of factual detail.

3. What are the similarities and differences between the three literary giants, Howells, Mark Twain, Henry James, in terms of their literary orientation?

A. They are the three dominant figures of the Realistic Period. Together they brought to fulfillment native trends in the realistic portrayal of the landscape and social surfaces, brought to perfection the vernacular style, and explored and exploited literary possibilities of the interior life.

B. Together in short, they set the example and charted the future course for the subject, themes, techniques and styles of fiction we still call modern.

C. Howells focused his discussion on the rising middle class .and the way they lived. Mark Twain preferred to have his own region and people at the forefront of his stories. While Henry James had apparently laid a greater emphasis on the "inner world" of man.

4. Why are naturalists inevitably pessimistic in their view?

A. Naturalism was greatly influenced by Darwin's evolutionary theory and French literature.

B. Naturalists accepted the more negative implications of Darwin’s theory and use it to count for the behavior of those characters in literary works who were conceived as more or less complex combinations of inherited attributes, their habits conditioned by social and economic forces.

C. Naturalism is evolved from realism when the author's tone in writing becomes

less serious and less sympathetic but more

ironic and more pessimistic.

◆Mark Twain(The Celebrated Jumping

Frog of Calaveras County//Innocents

Abroad//The Gilded Age)

1. Mark Twain and Henry James are two

representatives of the realistic writers in

American literature. How is Twain's

realism different from James’s realism?

A. Mark Twain's realism is tainted with

local color, preferring, to have his own

region and people at the forefront of his

stories.

B. James's realism is concerned with the

"inner world" of man.

C. James's realism is also concerned with

the international theme.

D. Twain's language is simple and

colloquial.

E. Twain employs humor in h is writing

F. James's language is elaborate and refined

with lengthy psychological analyses.

2. What is the language style of Mark

Twain?

A. Use of vernacular made colloquial

speech an accepted, respected literary

medium in literary history.

B. Words: colloquial, concrete and direct in

effect;

C. Sentence structures: simple, even

ungrammatical

D. Local colorism: his characters are

confined to a particular region and to a

particular historical moment; speak with a

strong accent; different characters from

different background talk differently.

3. In American literature what is the

significance of Adventures of

Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain?

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and,

especially, its sequence Adventures of

Huckleberry Finn proved themselves to be

the milestone in American literature, and

thus firmly established Twain's position in

the literary world.

The childhood of Tom Sawyer and Huck

Finn in the Mississippi is a record of a

vanished way of life in the pre-Civil War

Mississippi valley and it has moved

millions of people of different ages and

conditions all over the world.

Huckleberry Finn marks the climax of

Twain's literary creativity. Hemingway

once described the novel the one book

forms which “a modern American literature

comes".

4. Briefly discuss Mark Twain's art of

fiction in terms of the setting, the

language and the characters, etc. , based

on his novel Adventures of Huckleberry

Finn.

A. Mark Twain uses the Mississippi valley

as his fictional kingdom, writing about the

landscape and people, the customs and the

dialects of one particular region, and is

therefore known as a local colorist.

B. He creates life-like characters, especially

the conventional Huckleberry Finn, who

runs away from civilization and stands

opposite to conventional morality.

C. He uses a simple, direct vernacular

language, totally different from any

previous literary language. It is the kind of

colloquial language belonging to the lower

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