ISSN 1798-4769 Journal of Language Teaching and Research, Vol. 10, No. 6, pp. 1327-1331, November 2019 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.17507/jltr.1006.23
A Study of the Humor in Mark Twain’s Classic Works Ling Wang School of Foreign Languages, Nanchang Normal University, Nanchang, China Abstract—Mark Twain is a famous critical realist writer in the late nineteenth Century. Through combining humor and irony, he makes a relentless expose and criticism of the ugly phenomena in American social life. Humor is a unique way of thinking in his mind; he used humor to bring laugh to human. At the same time, he mercilessly criticized the ugly social reality, a profound reflection of the human condition in the world of metaphysical philosophy explores. The excellent satirical art in a number of his works showed, not only became an independent school at the time of the American literature, but also had a profound impact on the future of American literature. In this article, the author uses humor as a clue, and narrates the art of humor in Mark Twain's classic novels, the author will describe about the specific language and writing techniques from some classic novels of Mark Twain, to explore the art of humor embodied in the novel and the consequences of humor, so as to let the readers have a more intuitive and profound understanding of Mark Twain's novels, and also show the expression of noble tribute to Mark Twain for his outstanding achievement. Index Terms—mark Twain, classical novels, humor
I. INTRODUCTION A. Overview of Research Background Mark Twain is the outstanding realistic writer and famous humorous writer in the late nineteenth Century in United States! He is good at using humor, as sharply, mercilessly, its creation will portray realism and romantic lyric harmony Unity. He wrote a lot of novels, most of these works are humorous strokes, the banter in truly see harmonic! The perfect unity of truth in Absurdity, His works were often funny and humor! Under the exaggeration of the surface, exposed the existence problem of human society in United States, humor reveals the beauty of good and evil in life, most incisive to express their love and praise, reflects Mark Twain's deep humanitarian concern to the society. The winner of Nobel Prize for literature Hemingway said that all modern American literature comes from the book called the adventures of Huckleberry Finn writing by Mark Twain, which is the best of all our books, never before, and not so far. Another Nobel Prize winner Faulkner has hailed him as the father of American Literature. These different evaluations show the great achievements made by Mark Twain in the history of American Literature, he is one of the greatest novelists in English Literature. The novels of Mark Twain truly represent the nature of the social life of his time. People who read his novels, in the narration of freely flowing style of writing, to appreciate the wisdom of the flash, or for the real description of the social reality, or a sharp criticism of the reality of society, or of life, human thinking, or the ultimate search on the world of human society. But Mark Twain's choice of narrative skills is out of the ordinary, he abandoned the general positive practice, his novels were born in the spirit of humor, humor became the main tone of the novel, his novel is a collection of depicting humorous painting, which hold obvious qualities of definite humor, profound criticism and vivid characteristic of his age. Humor is a unique way of thought for Mark Twain. As a talented orator with a wealth of experience, Mark Twain is good at applying humorous techniques of speech and recitation to the written language of novel. At the same time, with his rich reading and personal experience, Mark Twain grasped the current real life as well as the language features of different social groups in the history, so that more vivid and accurate outline of all kinds of a variety of characters, to enhance the sense of humor art. That is also an expression of humor by Mark Twain. B. The Reasons and Purposes of the Topic Since then, numerous studies have been completed such theme in literary field. Wang Xue (2014) has wrote an essay about the stylistic analysis of humor for Mark Twain’s short stories, which concluded that humor can be produced by stylistic devices, and the reason why generation mechanism of humor produced by stylistic devices, which is helpful to realize and analyze the humorous phenomenon produced by stylistic devices. As to the humor theories in linguistics, this thesis introduces the Semantic Script Theory of Humor and Cooperative Principles. Chen Zhijing (2011) came up with some ideas in Age Literature that the humor of Mark Twain divided into three points: hyperbole, contrast and satire. He connected the humor with satire, which set a good example for later writers. Mark Twain’ humor experience three steps: babyhood, maturity, grief, it also made his novels become more brilliant. Moreover, it was found by Anhui Literature that Mark Twain was a master of humor, and his works were famous for deeply ideology. From the aspects in characterization, language and storyline, Mark Twain polished the humorous features to give the novels new meaning and style. Great progress has been made in this field, different scholar had different idea with Mark Twain’s novels, and © 2019 ACADEMY PUBLICATION