Colloquial style:
“It is a book from which All American literature comes.”
The frontier tall-tale tradition and American local colorism
Mark Twain
Representative of local colorism; distinctive for his frontier humor and brilliant adoption of colloquial style; low-class oriented Your company slogan
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The features of realistic writing style
verisimilitude of detail derived from observation The effort to approach the norm of experience– a reliance on the representative in plot, setting and character The effort to offer an objective rather than an idealized view of human nature and experience
Criticism and Fiction The Rise of Silas Lapham
William Dean Howells
The forerunner of realism who moulds the public taste and spreads the credo of realism through writing ; genteel realism; middle-class oriented Your company slogan
2. The ultimate aim of the local colorists: the create the illusion of an indigenous little world with qualities that tell it apart from the world outside.
Simon Wheeler backed me into a corner and blockaded me there with his chair, and then sat me down and reeled off the monotonous narrative which follows this paragraph. He never smiled, he never frowned, he never changed his voice from the gentle-flowing key to which he tuned the initial sentence, he never betrayed the slightest suspicion of enthusiasm; but all through the interminable narrative there ran a vein of impressive earnestness and sincerity, which showed me plainly that, so far from his imagining that there was any thing ridiculous or funny about his story, he regarded it as a really important matter, and admired its two heroes as men of transcendent genius in finesse. To me, the spectacle of a man drifting serenely along through such a queer yarn without ever smiling, was exquisitely absurd. As I said before, I asked him to tell me what he knew of Rev. Leonidas W. Smiley, and he replied as follows. I let him go on in his own way, and never interrupted him once:
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Note: American tall tale from which Colorism derives
Origin: a fundamental element of American folk literature; Originating in the 1820s, seen in the bragging contests that often occurred when the rough men of the American frontier gathered; essentially an oral form of entertainment; remaining popular now.
A humorist and social critic: “The source of laughter is not humor, but sorrow.” (from an optimist to a determinist) Mississippi and the West: “Mark Twain was his own biographer.”
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Analysis
of The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County by Mark Twain Your company slogan
Extract from The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County by Mark Twain
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Social background of American in its 70s and 80s
The Age of Realism
After the Civil War (1861-1865), capitalist America witnesses the looming of a gilded age rather than a golden age Heading for industrialization: the deterioration in public morality; public lust for wealth and power Extremes of wealth and poverty: the concentration of wealth in the hands of the few Life: a veritable struggle for survival Basic tone: widely felt disillusionment and frustration
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American realistic tradition: non-Dickens, more psychological analysis Ethics concerned: the greatest happiness of the greatest number
Henry James
Forerunner of psychological realism; middle- and high-class oriented
Mark Twain
Representative of local colorism; distinctive for his frontier humor and brilliant adoption of colloquial style; low-class oriented
International theme: American innocence in contact and contrast with European decadence Psychological realism: the adoption of the technique of “point of view”(有限视 角) to explore characters’ psychological reality with little authorial intervention The first stage(1865-1882): The third stage(1895-1900): The Wings of the Dove (1902) The Ambassadors (1903) The Golden Bowl (1904)
Texture: elements which characterize a local culture, such as speech, customs, and mores peculiar to one particular place Background: physical setting and those distinctive qualities of landscape which condition human thought and behavior
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Note：The two-stage development of realism
Time span: 1865-1918
II：After the 1890s