Major Themes, Historical Perspectives, and Personal Issues

Two of the historical issues that are important have already been referred to: evangelical Christianity, and the cult of domesticity. To this should be added the abolitionist crusade in the 1850s, the furor over the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law, and the change in the temper of the country after the Civil War--a turn from moral to social reform, and from romanticism to realism in literature--which accounts for the change in the temper and tone of Stowe's writing in this period.

At her best, Stowe was an early and effective realist. Her portraits of local social life and her settings communicate the culture of her time. She provides us today a picture of the Florida of her time, the 1800s.

 

 

22. Значение творчества М.Твена для развития американской литературы.

 

Samuel Longhorne Clemens (1835-1910), known by the pen name Mark Twain, has been called “the father of American literature. ” In his day he was America’s most famous literary icon. A humorist, satirist, lecturer and novelist, Twain combined narrative wit and a strong sense of irony to create distinctive masterpieces based on American culture and language. His works drew upon his extensive travels and show a remarkable depth of human character and perception of individual experience. Twain’s writing provides a unique reflection of the American way of life in the latter part of the nineteenth century.

American author Mark Twain was called the "Father of American Literature" by William Faulkner and it was a title well deserved. With classic tales like The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Twain set the standard for childhood adventure.

Mark Twain was born Samuel Langhorne Clemens on November 30, 1835 in Florida, Missouri. While he was the sixth of seven children, he was one of only four to survive childhood. The family moved to Hannibal, Missouri when Twain was four years old. The town sat on the banks of the Mississippi River, which would play a major part in many of Twain's tales. Slavery was still legal in Missouri at this time as well and it too would be a theme Twain explored in his writing.

After a trip down the Mississippi, Twain was inspired to become a steamboat pilot, a very rewarding occupation in that day. He earned his license in 1859 and convinced his brother Henry to work with him. Unfortunately, Henry was killed in a steamboat explosion. Twain carried the guilt of his brother's death with him throughout his life. Twain continued on as a steamboat pilot until the Civil War broke out in 1861 and traffic on the Mississippi dwindled. He traveled westward in a stagecoach with his brother Orion, briefly working as a miner, before ending up in San Francisco. It was in San Francisco where Twain would begin working as a journalist. The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County was published in the New York Saturday Press in 1865, bringing Twain national attention.

In 1870, Twain married his wife, Olivia, who exposed him to new ideas including abolition, women's rights and social equality. Although a southerner by birth, Twain would spend the next 17 years in Connecticut, writing some of his most popular works. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer may have been written in Connecticut, but the setting of the novel was pure Missouri, as was Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Life on the Mississippi. He would use the character Tom Sawyer not only in the original novel and in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, but also in Tom Sawyer Abroad and Tom Sawyer, Detective. The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson was about a young lawyer in a fictional Missouri town.

Not all of Twain's writings were centered on southern life. He wrote The Prince and the Pauper about a pauper in the Offal Court in London and was his first attempt at historical fiction. His 1880 novel, A Tramp Abroad, described his second trip to Europe. Twain's 1889 novel, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, tells the story of Hank Morgan, a Connecticut Yankee who finds himself magically transported back to the time of King Arthur.

Twain was quite the celebrity during his lifetime.

Трудно недооценить значение произведений Марка Твена для развития американской литературы в прошедшем столетии. Присущий писателю гигантский талант юмориста-психолога и юмориста-поэта помог ему создать произведение необычайно большого эстетического значения. Самым большим вкладом Твена в американскую и мировую литературу считается роман «Приключения Гекльберри Финна». Именно с появлением этого романа критический реализм в американской литературе достиг своего расцвета. Многие считают это вообще лучшим литературным произведением, когда-либо созданным в США. Марк Твен является вместе с Уитменом - основоположником реалистического направления в литературе США девятнадцатого столетия. Но в романе о Геке он выступает не только как противник романтизма в американской литературе, но и как писатель, в творчестве которого реализм и романтические тенденции переплетаются, слиты в одно целое.

Значение образа Гека, одного из величайших образов, когда-либо созданных американскими писателями, столь огромно, что Хемингуэй имел полное основание отметить уникальную ценность книги о Гекльберри Финне, сказав, что современная литература США "вышла из одной книги Марка Твена, которая называется "Гекльберри Финн" Также очень популярны «Приключения Тома Сойера», «Янки из Коннектикута при дворе короля Артура» и сборник документальных очерков «Жизнь на Миссисипи».

 

23. Творчество О.Генри.

 

The American short story writer O. Henry was born under the name William Sydney Porter in Greensboro, North Carolina (September 11, 1862 – June 5, 1910). His short stories are well known throughout the world; noted for their witticism, clever wordplay, and unexpected endings.

Like many other writers, O. Henry's early career wandered across different activities and professions before he found his calling as a short story writer. As a lover of classic literature, O Henry had begun writing as a hobby. When he lost his banking job he moved to Houston in 1895 and started writing for the The Post, earning $25 per month. O. Henry collected ideas for his column by loitering in hotel lobbies and observing and talking to people there. He used this technique throughout his writing career.

O. Henry's prolific writing period began in 1902 in New York City, where he wrote 381 short stories. Some of his best and least known work is contained in Cabbages and Kings, his first collection of published stories, set in a central American town, in which sub-plots and larger plots are interwoven in an engaging manner. His second collection of stories, The Four Million, is based on the idea that there are only really 400 people worth knowing in New York City. O. Henry had an obvious affection for New York City, where many of his stories are set.

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. Both are entertaining stories read in classrooms around the world.

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.

In 1952, a film featuring five stories, called O. Henry's Full House, featured Marilyn Monroe and Charles Laughton.

Unfortunately, O. Henry's personal tragedy was heavy drinking and by 1908 his health had deteriorated and his writing dropped off. He died in 1910 of cirrhosis of the liver, complications of diabetes and an enlarged heart. The funeral was held in New York City, but he was buried in North Carolina, the state where he was born. He was a gifted short story writer, and left us a rich legacy of great stories to enjoy.

 

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

 

Jack London

In general, naturalism is the literary movement that provides the best context for Jack London. Naturalism has been understood as a dialectic between free will and determinism (Charles Child Walcutt, American Literary Naturalism, A Divided Stream [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1956]), but it is probably most intelligible through social history. 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 stock naturalistic device involves taking an "overcivilized" man from the upper classes into a primitive environment where he must live by muscle and wit. Frank Norris uses this device in Moran of the Lady Letty, as does London in The Sea-Wolf. The Call of the Wild also fits this pattern, although here the hero is a dog. Buck, a dog of northern ancestry who has been raised in southern California, is kidnapped and taken to Alaska where he must adapt to snow and the rule of the club.

In another common naturalistic pattern, the hero who stays in the city either becomes an ineffectual dandy or degenerates into a lower-class brute. Frank Norris's Vandover and the Brute, set in San Francisco, traces the downward arc of Vandover's career from a Harvard education through the urban horrors of drink, dissipation, and aimless drifting to his ultimate reward: he literally becomes a primitive brute when he falls victim to lycanthropy and finds himself barking like a wolf. London treats these materials more realistically, yet employs the same pattern whereby the city is associated with degeneration and the open country with rebirth. Both Burning Daylight and The Valley of the Moon contrast the vitality of the heroes in the country to the dissipation and bad luck they encounter in the city. "South of the Slot" departs from this pattern by portraying the city as the setting for a working-class victory.

Francis Bret Harte (August 25, 1836^[2] – May 6, 1902) was an American author and poet, best remembered for his accounts of pioneering life in California.

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.

Impact. In Harte’s best stories he balances realistic description, dialect, and characterization with sentimental plots and narration. His tales rely heavily on local color, and the Humboldt River, Nevada, about which he wrote became known as “Bret Harte Country.” Harte used a detached, third-person point of view, and his sophisticated, highly polished narration made palatable to genteel eastern readers the rough-and-tumble characters, dialogue, and events in his stories. Though his vogue was brief and he never attained the lasting reputation of his friend Samuel Clemens, 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.

 

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

 

Henry James, (1843-1916), was one of America's greatest writers. In his short stories and novels, he created characters of great psychological complexity. His prose style changed over the course of his 50-year writing career. At first, James' style was straightforward and realistic, and he often sharply satirized manners and morals. Later, his style became complicated, and his basic realism became deepened by a rich, almost poetic symbolism. James also wrote literary criticism. His reviews, essays, and prefaces have established him as one of the most important theorists of fiction.

The Ambassadors (1903), The Turn of the Screw (1898), and The Portrait of a Lady (1881)

James's works include narrative romances with highly developed characters set amongst illuminating social commentary on politics, class, and status, as well as explorations of the themes of personal freedom, feminism, and morality. In his short stories and novels he employs techniques of interior monologue and point of view to expand the readers' enjoyment of character perception and insight.

James is one of the major figures of trans-Atlantic literature. His works frequently juxtapose characters from the Old World (Europe), embodying a feudal civilization that is beautiful, often corrupt, and alluring, and from the New World (United States), where people are often brash, open, and assertive and embody the virtues—freedom and a more highly evolved moral character—of the new American society. James explores this clash of personalities and cultures, in stories of personal relationships in which power is exercised well or badly. His protagonists were often young American women facing oppression or abuse.

Красной нитью через всё его творчество проходит тема непосредственности и наивности представителей Нового Света, которые вынуждены приспосабливаться либо бросать вызов интеллектуальности и коварству клонящегося к упадку Старого Света («Дейзи Миллер»,1878; «Женский портрет», 1881; «Послы», 1903). В 1875-76 г писатель обосновался в Париже, где был написан роман «Американец» (1877) — история про бесхитростного и прямолинейного американского миллионера, который пытается войти в семью высокомерных и коварных французских аристократов.

Предмодернизм[править]

В больших романах XX века — «Крылья голубки», 1902; «Послы», 1903; «Золотая чаша», 1904 — Джеймс сводит число персонажей к минимуму и ставит их в психологически напряжённые ситуации, подлинная драматичность которых раскрывается по ходу повествования. Его проза насыщается сложными грамматическими конструкциями, культурными аллюзиями и символическими образами, становится всё более субъективной и тяжёлой для понимания, предвещая эстетикумодернизма.

Для записи своих текстов стареющий Джеймс всё чаще прибегает к услугам стенографистки. Одновременно размышляет над путями развития современного романа (книга «Мастерство романа»). В 1905 и 1909 гг. он издал два томика путевых заметок, посвящённых Англии и Италии, соответственно. В 1904-05 гг. в последний раз посетил США, с тревогой отметив расцвет идеологии потребительства и всеобщий культ материального преуспевания.

 

26. Творчество У.Фолкнера.

 

William Faulkner (1897-1962)


Born to an old southern family, William Harrison Faulkner was raised in Oxford, Mississippi, where he lived most of his life. 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.

 

Key works:

 

 

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

 

MODERNISM