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Introduction

Faulkner called Mark Twain “the first truly American writer”; Eugene O’Neill dubbed him “the true father of American literature.” Charles Darwin kept Twain’s “Innocents Abroad” on his bedside table, within easy reach when he wanted to clear his mind and relax at bedtime. Joseph Conrad often thought of Life on the Mississippi when he commanded a steamer on the Congo. Friedrich Nietzsche admired Tom Sawyer. Ernest Hemingway claimed “All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn”. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt took the phrase “New Deal” from A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, a book which led science fiction giant Isaac Asimov to credit Twain (along with Jules Verne) with having invented time travel. When José Martí read Yankee he was so moved by Twain’s depiction of “the vileness of those who would climb atop their fellow man, feed upon his misery, and drink from his misfortune” that he wanted to “set off for Hartford (Connecticut) to shake his hand.”has been called the American Cervantes, Tolstoy, Shakespeare and etc. From the breezy slang and deadpan humor that peppered his earliest comicto the unmistakably American characters who populated his fiction. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was America’s literary Declaration of Independence, a book no Englishman could have written - a book that expanded the democratic possibilities of what a modern novel could do and what it could be.helped define the rhythms of prose and the contours of American moral map. Twain’s quirky, ambitious, strikingly original fiction and nonfiction engaged some of the perennially thorny, messy challenges we are still grappling with today - such as the challenge of making sense of a nation founded on freedom by men who held slaves; or the puzzle of our continuing faith in technology in the face of our awareness of its destructive powers; or the problem of imperialism and the difficulties involved in getting rid of it. Indeed, it would be difficult to find an issue on the horizon today that Twain did not touch on somewhere in his work.

§1. MARK TWAIN: THE FIRST TRULY AMERICAN WRITER

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Realism was described by an American journalist Ambrose Bierce as “the art of depicting nature as it is seen by toads” and having “the charm suffusing a landscape painted by a mole, or a story written by a measuring worm.” That definition would have delighted Mark Twain , born Samuel Langhorne Clemens (1835-1910), because of its mordant wit and because all of his work could be seen as a series of negotiations between realism and romance. He relied, frequently and frankly, on personal experience: in accounts of his travels, for instance, like The Innocents Abroad (1869), Roughing It (1872), and A Tramp Abroad (1880). Even those books of his that were the results of strenuous imaginative effort can be read as attempts to resolve his inner divisions, and create some sense of continuity between his present and his past, his critical investment in common sense, pragmatism, and progress and his emotional involvement in his childhood and the childhood of his region and nation.inner divisions and discontinuity were, in fact , inseparable. For all of Twain’s best fictional work has to do with what has been called “the matter of Hannibal”; that is, his experiences as a child in the slave holding state of Missouri and his years as a steamboat pilot on the Mississippi. This was not simply a matter of nostalgia for the good old days before the Civil War, of the kind to be found in other, simpler writers born in the South like, say, Thomas Nelson Page or Richard Malcolm Johnston (1822-1898). Nor was it merely another example of the romantic idealization of youth, although Twain did firmly believe that, youth being “the only thing worth giving to the race,” to look back on one’s own childhood was to give oneself “a cloudy sense of having been a prince, once, in some enchanted far off land, & of being in exile now, & desolate.” It was rather, and more simply, that Twain recognized intuitively that his years as a boy and youth, in the pre-Civil War South, had formed him for good and ill. So to explore those years was to explore the often equivocal nature of his own vision. It was also, and more complexly, that Twain also sensed that the gap, the division he felt between his self and his experiences before and after the war was, in its detail unique of course, but also typical, representative. So to understand that gap, that division, was to begin at least to understand his nation and its times. 1.1 Overview: Biography and Writing

moved with his family to the Mississippi River town of Hannibal, Missouri when he was 4. A small town with a population of about a thousand, Hannibal was a former frontier settlement that had become a backwater. Leaving school at the age of 12, Twain received his real education as a journeyman printer; and, having spent his first eighteen years in the South, he began to travel widely. His travels eventually brought him back to the Mississippi where, in the late 1850s, he trained and was licensed as a riverboat pilot. After his years in Hannibal, this was the most formative period of his life.

“I loved the profession far better than any I have followed since, ”Twain was to say later, in Life on the Mississippi (1883). “The reason is plain: a pilot, in those days, was the only unfettered and entirely independent human being that lived in earth.” Piloting taught Twain lessons in freedom that were to be immensely valuable to him later. But when the Civil War began, the riverboats ceased operation and, after a brief period serving with a group of Confederate volunteers, he traveled west. There, he spent the rest of the war prospecting for silver with his brother and then working with Bret Harte as a journalist


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