New tendencies in literature

After the Civil War, the center of the American nation moved westwards and American tastes followed. The new literary era was one of humor and realism. The new subject matter was the American West.

The trend started with BRET HARTE, another leader of local color realism. He was a New Yorker, who had moved to California during the “Gold Rush” days of 1850s. He achieved his great success with his short story, The Luck of Roaring Camp. It is set in a dirty mining camp, filled with gamblers, prostitutes and drunks during the Gold Rush. The camp and its people are completely changed when a baby is born there. The story combines frontier vulgarity with religious imagery and yet still manages to be funny.

The reading public loved Harte’s stories about the Far West and many other writers followed his lead. The real importance of his stories is that they provided the model for all the “Westerns” which have since appeared as novels and movies.

The work of MARK TWAIN (Samuel Clemens, 1835-1910) was the best example of the new outlook. He was one of the first Western writers who were able to create the first “all-American” literature, representing the entire nation.

Being a child Twain could hear many Indian legends and listen to the stories of the black slaves. But the life of the river itself influenced him the most. The arrival of the big steamboats excited his boyhood dreams of adventure.

Like all the Western humorists, Twain’s work is filled with stories about how ordinary people trick experts, or how the weak succeed in “hoaxing” the strong. Twain’s most famous character, Huck Finn, is a master at this.

In 1867, Twain’s newspaper sent him to Europe and the Holy Land. When his letters were published, he became an American literary hero. The letters then became his first major book, The Innocents Abroad (1869). The book clearly shows his “democratic” hatred of the European aristocracy. Although he is critical of Europeans, he is much more critical of American tourists in Europe. He laughs at tourists who pretend to be excited by the art treasures they see there. They are only excited because their guide books tell them they should be. He also attacks tourists in Jerusalem who show false religious feelings. In 1880, Twain tried to write another humorous book about travel in Europe, A Tramp Abroad, but it was not as fresh or as funny as the first one.

The period of the Civil war was a time when a small number of millionaire businessmen held great power in American society. The city homes of the very rich looked like palaces and people thought of this period as a new “Golden Age”. But the gold was only on the surface. Underneath, American society was filled with crime and social injustice. It was, in fact, only a “Gilded Age”: the gold was just a thin layer. Mark Twain created this phrase for his next novel, The Gilded Age (1873), co-written with Charles Warner. It was one of the first novels which tried to describe the new morality (or immorality) of post-Civil War America. One of the elements of this novel is that it creates a picture of the entire nation, rather than of just one region. Although it has a number of Twain’s typically humorous characters, the real theme is America’s loss of its old idealism. The book describes how a group of young people are morally destroyed by the dream of becoming rich.

Twain’s Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) was a story about “bad boys”, a popular theme in American literature. The two young heroes, Tom and Huck Finn, are “bad” only because they fight against the stupidity of the adult world. In the end they win. Twain creates a highly realistic background for his story. We get to know the village very well, with its many colorful characters, its graveyards and the house in which there was supposed to be a ghost. Although there are many similarities between Tom and Huck, there are also important differences. Twain studies the psychology of his characters carefully. In his great novel, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), Twain gives his young hero very adult problems. Huck and an escaped slave, Jim, are floating down the Mississippi River on a raft. During their trip, in the various towns and villages along the way, Huck learns about the evil of the world. Huck, meanwhile, is facing a big moral problem. The laws of society say he must return Jim to his “owner”. But, in the most important part of the book, he decides that the slave is a man, not a “thing”. He thinks deeply about morality and then decides to break the law. After that, he is not a child any more. Many see TheAdventures of Huckleberry Finn as the great novel of American democracy. It shows the basin goodness and wisdom of ordinary people.

Дата добавления: 2015-11-16