MarkTwain简介.ppt

Mark Twain Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn Literary style of Mark Twain The colorful language: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is written in the colloquial style, in the general standard speech of uneducated Americans. His style is known as local colorism. Passage from Huckleberry Finn “I took the sack of corn meal and took it to where the canoes was hid, and shoved the vines and branches apart and put it in; then I done the same with the side of bacon; then the whisky-jug. I took all the coffee and sugar there was, and all the ammunition; ” Mark Twain is the pen name of Samuel Langhorne Clemens (1835-1910), Americas most famous humorist and the author of popular and outstanding autobiographical works, travel books and novels. The first 36 years of Clemens life as a boy in a little town in Missouri, as a steamboat pilot on the Mississippi, as a reporter on the far western frontier and as a traveler abroad supplied him with ample material which he used later for his best and most successful writings. Mark TwainMirror of America The New American Experience lTwain lived in the stirring years in American history: the American-Mexican War; the Civil War; the Gold Rush; the westward expansion; the American- Spanish War; the rapid development of capitalism and later the emergence of imperialism along with the first economic depressions, etc. Mississippi River lThe Mississippi River provides the western boundary to the state of Mississippi. The course of the river has changed many times throughout the centuries, creating backwater deposits and fertile alluvial plains in the wake of each change. Mississippi residents grow cotton and soybean crops in the lowland region near the river, known as the Mississippi Delta. Mississippi Delta Mississippi River Valley lOne of the broadest and longest valleys in the world is the Mississippi River Valley, which crosses the United States from north to south. The Mississippi River winds down the center of this valley, and is joined at intervals by other major rivers flowing in their own valleys, such as the Missouri, Ohio, and Tennessee rivers. The deepest valley in the world is a section of the Indus River Valley in Kashmir. As it passes through the western end of the Himalayas, the difference in height between the valley bottom and the top of the drainage divide is about 7000 m (about 23,000 ft). Westward Movement lWestward Movement, American, movement of people from the settled regions of the United States to lands farther west. Between the early 17th and late 19th centuries, Anglo- American peoples and their societies expanded from the Atlantic Coast to the Pacific Coast. This westward movement, across what was often called the American frontier, was of enormous significance. By expanding the nations borders to include more than three million square miles, the United States became one of the most powerful nations of the 20th century. However,