Discuss the local color reflected in Mark Twain’s novels.
【正确答案】：(1) Twain is known as a local colorist, who preferred to present social life through portraits of the local characters of his regions, including people living in that area, the landscape, and other peculiarities like the customs, dialects, costumes and so on. Consequently, the rich material of his boyhood experience on the Mississippi became the endless resources for his fiction, and the Mississippi valley and the west became his major theme. Unlike James and Howells, Mark Twain wrote about the lower-class people, because they were the people he knew so well and their life was the one he had lived. Moreover, he successfully used local color and historical settings to illustrate and shed light on the contemporary society. (2) His words are colloquial, concrete and direct in effect, and his sentences structures are simple, even ungrammatical, which is typical of the spoken language. And Twain skillfully used the colloquialism to cast his protagonists in their everyday life. What's more, his characters, confined to a particular region and to a particular historical moment, speak with a strong accent, which is true of his local colorism.
【题目解析】：教材480页第三段和481页第二段。马克?吐温的文学特点之一是地方色彩，本题正是考察这一点。马克?吐温善于描绘地方风物，包括地方人物、风光、风俗、方言和服饰等。他在密西西比河上的童年成了他小说的取之不尽的素材。密西西比河谷和西部成了他写作的主题。不像詹姆斯和豪威尔斯，马克?吐温描写下层人民的生活，这些生活是他亲身经历的，他对地方色彩和历史背景的描写也折射了现代社会的一些内容。而且他的用词口语化，具体可感、直率有力，句子结构简单，不合语法。这种口语化符合人物的日常生活，他笔下的人物是在特定的时间和地方生活的，他们带有强烈的土腔，符合地方色彩。
