Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

It might be the best novel ever written in the US. First of all, it's about slavery and relations between black and white people, at a time when the slavery issue was coming to a head politically, leading to the Civil War. Secondly, it's Mark Twain, the greatest writer of his generation and one of the best ever.

But also H.F. shows incredible attention to detail. Everyone in the book speaks a little different dialect, and Twain himself said he spent a long time researching the dialects. (He said in the prologue that you shouldn't think that everyone in the book is trying to sound the same but not succeeding.)

Themes:

- Racism and Slavery

- Intellectual and Moral Education (an individual’s maturation and development. As a poor, uneducated boy, for all intents and purposes an orphan, Huck distrusts the morals and precepts of the society that treats him as an outcast and fails to protect him from abuse. Huck bases these decisions on his experiences, his own sense of logic, and what his developing conscience tells him.)

23.Творчество О.Генри.

O. Henry (William Sydney Porter) (1862 –1910)

His short stories are well known throughout the world; noted for their witticism, clever wordplay, and unexpected endings.

His two most famous short stories are probably The Gift of the Magi about a young couple who are short of money but desperately want to buy each other Christmas gifts. And The Ransom of Red Chief, a story about two hapless kidnappers that snatch the wrong boy.

O. Henry's trademark is his witty, plot-twisting endings, and his warm characterization of the awkward and difficult situations and the creative ways people find to resolve them.

24.Романтические и реалистические традиции в творчестве Д.Лондона и Б.Гарта.

Naturalism is a movement taking place from 1865 to 1900. A literary work should present life exactly as it is. The naturalist writer also attempted to be painstakingly scientific, objective and detached observation of life without idealism or avoidance of the ugly. It emphasizes that social conditions, heredity, and environment have inescapable force in shaping human character. Naturalistic writers were influenced by the evolution theory of Charles Darwin.

First introduced by the French writer Émile Zola in the 1880s, Naturalism, an extension of Realism, was a reaction to the tenets of Romanticism, which idealized emotion and adventure. While Realism attempts to depict characters and their situations as truthfully as possible, Naturalism moves beyond realistic description to also address the psychological and evolutionary forces that contribute to a character’s decision making. Characters must confront their limitations and adapt in a world that can be violent, powerful, and destructive.

Klondike Gold Rush (1897)

Jack London (1876 года —1916)

In general, naturalism is the literary movement that provides the best context for Jack London. The appeal of naturalistic tales is often escape. The urban problems of unemployment, labor wars, and poverty are left behind for a spare scenario in which an individual can be tested.

A naturalistic device involves taking an "overcivilized" man from the upper classes into a primitive environment where he must live by muscle and wit.

In another common naturalistic pattern, the hero who stays in the city either becomes an ineffectual dandy or degenerates into a lower-class brute.

London read many books and believed in Darwin's evolutionary theory of “survival of the fittest” and also Nietzsche's superman.

The Sea-Wolf

The Call of the Wild (1903)

White Fang (1906)

People of the Abyss

Martin Eden

Hardships in nature force London’s characters to be flexible and resourceful in order to survive— and sometimes, fail. Often rejecting civilization in order to follow an inner intuition, characters like Buck (The Call of the Wild) function within Charles Darwin’s construct of survival of the fittest.

Francis Bret Harte (1836 –1902) was an American author and poet, best remembered for his accounts of pioneering life in California. – РАЗВИТИЕ АМЕРИКАНСКОЙ НОВЕЛЛЫ

Bret Harte, the first American writer from the West Coast to gain an international reputation, was instrumental in introducing frontier literature to eastern audiences. His stories established many of the basic characteristics of the western genre: rough, sarcastic humor, rustic dialect, and character types such as good-natured gamblers, greedy bankers, and prostitutes with hearts of gold. His literary fame was brief, lasting less than a decade, but it helped make possible the success of other frontier writers.

In Harte’s best stories he balances realistic description, dialect, and characterization with sentimental plots and narration. His tales rely heavily on local color. Bret Harte’s writing was instrumental in popularizing stories of the western frontier and in establishing the characteristics of the western genre that survive in books and movies today.

Их натуралистическая новелла рисует американскую жизнь в резких и суровых чертах, нащупывая ее коренные социальные противоречия.

25.Литературные тенденции рубежа 19-20вв.: Г.Джеймс.

American fiction

Henry James, (1843-1916)

In his short stories and novels, he created characters of great psychological complexity. His reviews, essays, and prefaces have established him as one of the most important theorists of fiction.

The Wings of the Dove (1902)

The Ambassadors (1903)

The Turn of the Screw (1898)

The Portrait of a Lady (1881)

His protagonists were often young American women facing oppression or abuse.

26.Творчество У.Фолкнера.

MODERNISM

Stream of consciousness

William Faulkner (1897-1962)

Faulkner created an entire imaginative landscape, Yoknapatawpha County, mentioned in numerous novels, along with several families with interconnections extending back for generations. Yoknapatawpha County, with its capital, "Jefferson," is closely modeled on Oxford, Mississippi, and its surroundings. Faulkner re-creates the history of the land and the various races – Indian, African-American, Euro-American, and various mixtures – who have lived on it. An innovative writer, Faulkner experimented brilliantly with narrative chronology, different points of view and voices (including those of outcasts, children, and illiterates), and a rich and demanding baroque style built of extremely long sentences full of complicated subordinate parts. 
The best of Faulkner's novels include The Sound and the Fury (1929) and As I Lay Dying (1930), two modernist works experimenting with viewpoint and voice to probe southern families under the stress of losing a family member; Light in August (1932), about complex and violent relations between a white woman and a black man; and Absalom, Absalom! (1936), perhaps his finest, about the rise of a self-made plantation owner and his tragic fall through racial prejudice and a failure to love. 
Most of these novels use different characters to tell parts of the story and demonstrate how meaning resides in the manner of telling, as much as in the subject at hand. The use of various viewpoints makes Faulkner more self-referential, or "reflexive," than Hemingway or Fitzgerald; each novel reflects upon itself, while it simultaneously unfolds a story of universal interest. Faulkner's themes are southern tradition, family, community, the land, history and the past, race, and the passions of ambition and love. He also created three novels focusing on the rise of a degenerate family, the Snopes clan: The Hamlet (1940), The Town (1957), and The Mansion (1959).

The Sound and Fury

Part 1: April 7, 1928 Benjy

Part 2: June 2, 1910 Quentin

Part 3: April 6, 1928 Jason

Part 4: April 8, 1928 Dilsey

(Appendix: Compson: 1699 – 1945)

27.Изображение американского общества в романах Т.Драйзера и Дж. Дж. Стейнбека и Э.Синклера.

REALISM

NATURALISM

Naturalism first appeared in Europe. It is usually traced to the works of Honor‚ de Balzac in the 1840s and seen as a French literary movement associated with Gustave Flaubert, Edmond and Jules Goncourt, Èmile Zola, and Guy de Maupassant. It daringly opened up the seamy underside of society and such topics as divorce, sex, adultery, poverty, and crime.

Naturalism flourished as Americans became urbanized and aware of the importance of large economic and social forces. By 1890, the frontier was declared officially closed. Most Americans resided in towns, and business dominated even remote farmsteads.

MUCKRAKING

THEODORE DREISER (1871 – 1945) ranks as the foremost American writer in the Naturalism movement (a pessimistic form of Realism). Dreiser's characters are victims of apparently meaningless incidents that result in pressures they can neither control nor understand. He based such novels as SISTER CARRIE and AN AMERICAN TRAGEDY on events from real life. He condemned not his villains, but the repressive, hypocritical society that produced them.

Dreiser's first novel, SISTER CARRIE, was partly based on the experiences of one of his sisters.

the Great Depression (1929­1933)

JOHN STEINBECK (1902 – 1968)

The crisis of the American Dream in John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath: mythic naturalism and experimental structure. The adaptability of the term “epic” to novels that portray social groups and/or representative individuals to capture the totality of the American experience in its variety and complexity.

John Steinbeck uses realistic depictions of working people in authentic settings to politically charge his work. When Steinbeck's material is examined through a working-class lens, we find a wealth of working-class themes embedded in the social commentary that runs throughout his work. It is these social observations, as best illustrated by The Grapes of Wrath.

The Grapes of Wrath charts the journey of a small group of farmers as they flee from the Dust Bowl and seek work in California. In the novel, the Joads are forced to sell their possessions for gas money, to abandon pets, and to leave their family land. Steinbeck shows us their experience in great detail. The Joads are hungry, beaten, and miserable. They are icons of working-class suffering during the Great Depression, and Steinbeck accurately shows their declining situation.

Additionally, working-class struggle can be seen in Of Mice and Men as Steinbeck uses land as a symbol of class consciousness. Throughout the novel it is land that makes men work in the morning and sleep at night; it is the dream of owning land that drives the protagonists. Steinbeck intended to present this unattainable dream, which was typical at the time of southwest workers, to the reader in an attempt to gain sympathy and make visible the social stigma of the working-class.

Steinbeck was deeply concerned with the working-class and wished to advance their interests through his writing.

Key works:

Cannery Row

East of Eden

Of Mice and Men

The Grapes of Wrath

The Pearl

The Red Pony

Novel The Grapes of Wrath (1939) follows the travails of a poor Oklahoma family that loses its farm during the Depression and travels to California to seek work. Family members suffer conditions of feudal oppression by rich landowners.

Upton Sinclair (1878 – 1968)

Sinclair was an idealistic supporter of socialism and became famous as a "muckraker." The muckrakers were writers in the early 1900s whose principal goal was exposing social and political evils.

Sinclair wrote The Jungle to expose the appalling working conditions in the meat-packing industry. His description of diseased, rotten, and contaminated meat shocked the public and led to new federal food safety laws.

In other novels, Sinclair attacked capitalistic society (THE METROPOLIS and THE MONEYCHANGERS, both 1908), conditions in coal mines (KING COAL, 1917), and the oil industry (OIL!, 1927).

Upton Beall Sinclair, Jr. (September 20, 1878 – November 25, 1968), was an American author and one-time candidate for governor of California who wrote close to one hundred books in many genres. He achieved popularity in the first half of the twentieth century, acquiring particular fame for his classic muckraking novel, The Jungle (1906). It exposed conditions in the U.S. meat packing industry, causing a public uproar that contributed in part to the passage a few months later of the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act.^[1] Time magazine called him "a man with every gift except humor and silence.

Он обрёл известность с выходом социологического романа «Джунгли» (The Jungle, 1906) — события одновременно литературного и общественного. Роман рассказывает о судьбе литовских иммигрантов, безжалостно эксплуатируемых на их новой родине, в США. Герой на пути к «социалистической вере» проходит путь от безработного люмпена-бродяги до узника и штрейкбрехера. Жена гибнет от преждевременных родов, оба сына умирают, также безрадостны судьбы их родственников. Всё это происходит на фоне натуралистичных сцен в мрачных чикагских бойнях, где в чудовищных миазмах разложения главный герой свежует павший туберкулезный скот, из мяса которого производятся консервы и колбаса. Этот документальный репортаж вместе с метафорическим заглавием, прочно закрепившись в обороте, повергнув читателей в шок, вызвал огромный резонанс — была создана сенатская комиссия для расследования ситуации на бойнях.

Писатель принадлежал к большой группе публицистов и журналистов — «разгребателей грязи», (лидер — Линкольн Стеффенс), печатавших в многотиражных изданиях обличения коррупции, фальсификации медикаментов, продажности стражей правопорядка, финансовых махинаций и торговли «живым товаром», эксплуатации детского труда и афер политиков.

Naturalistic writers were influenced by Darwin’s theory, in that they believed that one's heredity and surroundings determine one's character. Whereas Realism seeks only to describe subjects as they really are, Naturalism also attempts to scientifically ascertain the underlying forces influencing those subjects' actions.

Both genres are diametrically opposed to Romanticism — Naturalistic works often include earthy, sordid, tell-it-as-it-is subject matter. An example might be a frankness about sexuality or a pervasive pessimism throughout a work.

28.Имажинизм и поэзия Э.Паунда.

Imagism is a movement in early 20th-century Anglo-American poetry that favored precision of imagery and clear, sharp language. The poets, led by Ezra Pound, called for clear and precise language in poetry, opposing the flowery semantics of Romantic and Victorian poetry.

Ezra Pound (1885 – 1972) is an American poet and critic of the early modernist movement. His contribution to poetry began with his promotion of Imagism, a movement that called for a return to more Classical values, stressing clarity, precision and economy of language.

The term ‘Imagist’ was conjured by Ezra Pound to characterize the style of recent work by his friends and collaborators, the American Hilda Doolittle (H. D.) and the Englishman Richard Aldington.

ancient Greek literature

H. D.’s poem is not a translation, but a loose version in which aesthetic goals related to the ideals of the Greek epigram are reconfigured as a modern poetics which specifically seeks to substitute a laconic detachment for what was perceived as the emotional effusive- ness of the late Victorian poets.

Символизм

Imagism is interesting not so much for the range of work which it pro- duced as for the intentions which shaped it and for its theoretical under- pinning, which Pound, in particular, developed into a whole poetics that in a variety of forms would buttress the work which occupied him for the whole of his writing life from 1917 onwards – The Cantos.

Like H. D., Pound at this time was seeking to create a modern mode of writing which would provide a flexible alternative to the Victorian mode, and satisfy a new aesthetic criterion based not on emotional indulgence but on the precision of the practice of writing itself.

- поиски нового изобразительного языка, точного слова и чистого образа

- имажинизм

- влияние Р. Браунинга и У.Б. Йейтса

- идея целостности культуры

- особенности переложения литературных сюжетов

- концепция идеограмматического метода и поиски ассоциативного языка поэзии

- энциклопедичность и интеллектуализм поэмы Cantos

29.Литература потерянного поколения: С.Фиджеральд. Э.Хемингуэй.

MODERNISM

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