MarkTwain(英文简介)

1、页眉内容Mark TwainMark Twain (1835-1910) is a great literary giant of America, whom H. L. Mencken considered“the true father of ournational literature.”With works like Adventure of HuckleberryFinn (1884) and Life on the Mississippi (1883) Twain shaped the worlds view of America and made a more extensive

2、combination of American folk humor and serious literature than previous writers had ever done.1. Brief Introduction to the AuthorMark Twain, Pen name of Samuel Langhorne Clemens, was born on November 30, 1835, in Missouri, and grew up inthe river town of Hannibal. After his father died, he began to

3、seek his own fortune .He once worked as a journeyman printer,a steamboat pilot, a newspaper colunist and as a deadpan lecturer. Twains writing took thoefhfourmorous journalism ofthe time, and itennabled him to master the technique of narration.Twain grew up in Hannibal, Missouri, which provided the

4、setting for Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer. After anapprenticeship with a printer, he worked as a typesetter and contributed articles to his older brother Orionnsewspaper. Helater became a riverboat pilot on the Mississippi River before heading west to join Orion in Nevada. He referred humorouslyto

5、 his singular lack of success at mining, turning to journalism for the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise. In 1865, hishumorous story,“The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County”waspublishebased on a story he heard at Angels Hotel in Angels Camp California where he had spent some time as a mi

6、ner. The shortstory brought international attention, even being translated to classic Greek. His wit and satire, in prose and in speech,earned praise from critics and peers, and he was a friend to presidents, artists, industrialists, and European royalty.Though Twain earned a great deal of money fro

7、m his writings and lectures, he invested in ventures that lost a great dealof money, notably the Paige Compositor, which failed because of its complexity and imprecision. In the wake of thesefinancial setbacks he filed for protection from his creditors via a bankruptcy filing, and with the help of H

8、enry HuttlestonRogers eventually overcame his financial troubles. Twain chose to pay all his pre-bankruptcy creditors in full, though he hadno responsibility to do this under the law.Twain was born shortly after a visit by Halleys Comet, and he predicted that he wouldout with it,”too. He died the da

9、y following the comets subsequent return. He was lauded as the“greatestAmerican humorist of his age,”and William Faulkner called Twain“thefather of American literature.”2. Mark Twains major worksIn l865, he pub1ished his frontier tale“The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County,which brought him

10、 recognition from a wider public. But his full literary career began to blossom in 1869 with a travel bookInnocents Abroad, an account of American tourists in Europe which pokes fun at the pretentious, decadent andundemocratic Old World in a satirical tone. Mark Twains best works were produced when

11、he was in the prime of his life. Allthese masterworks drew upon the scenes and emotions of his boyhood and youth. The first among these books is RoughingIt (1872), in which Twain describes a journey that works its way farther west. Life on the Mississippi tells a story of hisboyhood ambition to beco

12、me a riverboat pilot. Two of the best books during this period are The Adventures of Tom Sawyer(1876) and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. The former is usually regarded as a classic book written for boys about theirparticular horrors and joys, while the latter, being a boys book specially written fo

13、r the adults, isTwains most representative work, describing a journey down the Mississippi undertaken by two fugitives, Huck and Jim.Their episodic set of encounters presents a sample of the social world from the bank of the river that runs through the heartof the country.页眉内容His social satire is Th

14、e Gilded Age, written in collaboration with Charles Dudley Warner. The novel explored thescrupulous individualism in a world of fantastic speculation and unstable values, and gave its name to the get-rich-quickyears of the post- Civil War era. Twains dark viewof the society became more self-evident

15、in the works published later in his life. In A Connecticut Yankee in King ArthurCsourt (1889), a parable of colonialization. A similar mood of despair permeates The Tragedy of PuddnheadWilson (1894),which shows the disastrous effects of slavery on the victimizer and the victim alike and reveals to u

16、s a Mark Twain whoseconscience as a white Southerner was tormented by fear and remorse. By the turn of the century, with the publication of TheMan that Corrupted Hadleyburg (l900) and The Mysterious Stranger (1916), the change in Mark Twain from an optimist to analmost despairing pessimist could be

17、felt and his cynicism and disillusionment with what Twain referred to regularly as the“damned human rabecame obvious.3. The Characteristics of Mark Twains Writing Style1) Twain as a local coloristTwain is also known as a local colorist, who preferred to present social life through portraits of the l

18、ocal characters of hisregions, including people living in that area, the landscape, and other peculiarities like the customs, dialects, costumes andso on. Consequently, the rich material of his boyhood experience on the Mississippi became the endless resources for hisfiction, and the Mississippi val

19、ley and the West became his major theme. Unlike James and Howe1ls, Mark Twain wroteabout the lower-class people, because they were the people he knew so we1l ancl their 1ife was the one he himself had lived.Moreover he successfully used local color and historical settings to i1lustrate and shed ligh

20、t on the contemporary society.2) His use of vernacularAnother fact that made Twain unique is his magic power with language, his use of vernacular. His words are col1oquial,concrete and direct in effect, and his sentence structures are simp1e, even ungrammatical, which is typical of the spoken1anguag

21、e. And Twain skillfully used the colloquialis m to cast his protagonists in their everyday life. Whats more, hischaracters, confinedto a particular region and to a particular historical moment, speak with a strong accent, which is true of his 1ocal colorism.Besides, different characters from differe

22、nt literary or cultural backgrounds talk differently, as is the case with Huck, Tom, andJim. Indeed, with his great mastery and effective use of vernacular, Twain has made colloquial speech an accepted,respectable 1iterary medium in the literary history of the country. His style of language was late

23、r taken up by his descendants,Sherwood Anderson and Ernest Hemingway, and influenced generations of letters.3) His humorMark Twains humor is remarkable, too. It is fun to read Twain to begin with, for most of his works tend to be funny,containing some practical jokes, comic details, witty remarks, e

24、tc., and some of them are actually tall ta1es. By consideringhis experience as a newspaperman, Mark Twain shared the popu1ar image of the American funny man whose punning,facetious, irreverenl articles filled the newspapers, and a great deal of his humor is characterized by puns, straight-facedexagg

25、eration, repetition, and anti-climax, let alone tricks of travesty and invective.However, his humor is not only of witty remarks mocking at small things or of farcical elements making people laugh, but akind of artistic style used to criticize the social injustice and satirize the decayed romanticis

26、m.4. Huckleberry Finn1) What is the book about?Huckleberry Finn , by general agreement, is Twains finest book and an outstanding Americannovel. Its narrator is Huck, a youngster whose carelessly recorded vernacular speech is admirably adapted to detailed andpoetic description of scenes, vivid repres

27、entations of characters, and narrative renditions that are both broadly comic andsubtly ironic.页眉内容Huck, son of the village drunkard, is uneducated, superstitious, and sometimes credulous; but he also has a nativeshrewdness, a cheerfulness that is hard to put down, compassionate tolerance, and an in

28、stinctive tendency to reach the rightdecisions about important matters. He runs away from his persecuting father and, with his companion, the runaway slave Jim,makes a long and frequently interrupted voyage floating down the Mississippi River on a raft. During the journey Huck meetsand comes to know

29、 members of greatly varied groups, so that the book memorably portrays almost every class living on oralong the river. Huck overcomes his initial prejudices and learns to respect and love Jim.The books pages are dotted with idyllic descriptions of the great river and the surrounding forests, and Huc

30、ksexuberance and unconscious humor permeate the whole. But a thread that runs through adventure after adventure is thetheme of manShumanity to man-of human cruelty. Children miss this theme, but adults who read the book with care cannotfail to be impressed by an attitude that was to become a reitera

31、ted theme of the author during his later years.2) The significance of the novelThe book marks the climax of Twainlsiterary creativity. Hemingway once described thenovel the one book from which“all modern American literature comes.”The book is significant inmany ways. First of all, the novel is writt

32、en in a language that is totally different from the rhetorical language used by Emerson,Poe, and Melville. It is not grand, pompous, but simple, direct, lucid, and faithful to the colloquial speech. This unpretentiousstyle of colloquialism is best described as“vernacular Sp”ea.king in vernacular, a

33、wild and uneducated Huck, running awayfrom civilization for his freedom, is vividly brought to life. Secondly, the great strength of the book also comes from the shapegiven to it by the course of the raftjosurney down the Mississippi as Huck and Jim seek their different kinds of freedom.Twain, who k

34、new the river intimately, uses it here both realistically and symbolically. Thirdly, the profound portrait ofHuckleberry Finn is another great contribution of the book to the legacy of American literature.The novel begins with a description of how Widow Douglas attempts to civilize Huck and ends wit

35、h him deciding not to let ithappen again at the hands of Aunt Sally. The climax arises with Hucksinner struggle on the Mississippi, when Huck ispolarized by the two opposing forces between his heart and his head, between his affection for Jim and the laws of thesociety against those who help slaves

36、escape.Hucks final decision to fo1lo-w his own good-hearted moral impulse rather than conventionalvillage morality-amounts to a vindication of what Mark Twain called”the damned human race,”damned for its comfortable hypocrisies, its thoroughgoing dishonesties, and its pervasive cruelties.With the ev

37、entual victory of his moral conscience over his social awareness, Huck grows.5. Selected ReadingAn Excerpt from Chapter 3l of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn1) The storyThis novel begins with Huck under the motherly protection of the Widow Douglas and her sister, Miss Watson. When hisfather comes to

38、demand the boys fortune, Huck pretends that hehas transferred the money to Judge Thather, so his father catches him and puts him into a lonely cabin. One night, after hisfather is drunken, Huck escapes to Jacksonissland and meets Miss Watsons runaway slave, Jim. They start down the riveron a raft. A

39、fter several adventures, the raft is hit by a steamboat and the two are separated. Huck swims ashore and is savedby the Grangerford family, whose feud with the Sheperdsons causes bloodshed. Later, Huck discovers Jim and they setdown again, giving refuge to a gang of frauds: the“Duke”and“King,”dramat

40、ic performances culminate in the fraudulent exhibition of the“Royal Nonesuch.”Huwitnesses the lynching and murder of a harmless drunkard by an Arkansas aristocrat on the shore.When he finds that some rogues intend to claim legacies as Peter Wilkss brother, Huck interfere on behalf of the threedaught

41、ers, and the scheme is failed by the arrival of the real brothers. Then页眉内容he discovers that the“King”has sold Jim to Mrs. Phelps, Tom Sawyers Aunt Sally. At the Phelps farm, Huck and Tom tryto rescue Jim. In the rescue, Tom is accidentally shot and Jim is recaptured. Later, Tom reveals that the res

42、cue is necessaryonly because he ted the adventures“wan of it.”It is also disclosed at the end of the novel that Hucks father has died, soHuck safe.2) The novels theme, characterization of“Huck”and the novels social significanceTheme: The novel is a vindication of what Mark Twain called“thedamned hum

43、an race.”That is the theme of mans in huma nity toamanma n cruelty, hypocrisies, dish on esties, andmoral corruptions. Mark Twains thematic contrasts between innocence and experience, nature andculture, wilderness and civilization.Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is best known for Mark Twains wonderful characterizationof“Huck,”a typical American boy whom its creato