Mark Twain (1835-1910) The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885)

General significance of Mark Twain (Samuel Langhorn Clemens): He started his career as a humorist in the Western tradition of comic journalism. Twain turned to present-day realities with a resolutely commonsensical eye (unlike Melville and Hawthorne). He was engaged in continually contrasting the feudalism of the Old World with the democracy of the New. Twain represented a mixture of romantic and realistic ideas. His achievement as a psychological realist: he could go beyond the superficial aspects of a region to its very spirit and to give this spirit microcosmic significance. He was one of the first writers to use colloquial speech for literary purposes. He used several indigenous strains to achieve vernacular style: o The Down East strain (revealed in understatements) represented by Tom Sawyer and Aunt Polly o The Old Southwest strain (animal antics, frontier boasts, tall tales, frame stories) o Blackface minstrelsy (Twain believed that blackface humor was an indigenous American form of expression) The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Autobiography o Shared with the Literary Comedians, gave him the image and techniques of a professional Humor in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: Twains humor is more satire than absurdity. He does not single out an individual in order to ridicule him or insult him. His humor verges more and more on tragic (for example, the shooting of Boggs). Humor in Twain's novel is in serious, diplomatic way rather than the funny way. No any single person is directly ridiculed by him. Twain uses satire to make fun out of special characters and situations, for example, the feud between the Grangerford and Shepherdson families is a parody of people in Romance novels. With parody, Twain makes the whole story more humorous (for example, the king and the dukes theatre performances). He applies caricature (an extreme exaggeration of a character) when he describes the king, the duke, Jim, Pap etc. Huck language is a typical of southern speech of a young boy, and his storytelling makes the story easily understandable and humorous for us (for example, borrowing something instead of stealing).