Missing Ralph Keeler: Bohemians,Brahmins and Literary Friendships in the Gilded Age

Abstract

Though almost entirely forgotten, Ralph Keeler (1840–1873) occupies a unique position in American literary history. In the decade after the Civil War, he achieved fame as an essayist and travel writer. Navigating between the literary poles of San Francisco and Boston at crucial moments, he developed significant friendships with luminaries like Mark Twain, William Dean Howells and Thomas Bailey Aldrich. But while those men were experiencing the transitions of marriage, fatherhood and domestic responsibility, Keeler remained a self-styled vagabond. He consciously crafted a distinctive reputation as a Bohemian bachelor, opposed to bourgeois respectability. This article argues that the rediscovery of Keeler’s lost trajectory through these personal and professional relationships changes our sense of the development of American literature in the postbellum period. In particular, Keeler serves as a point of comparison that complicates our understanding of the life, work and self-conception of canonical figures like Twain and Howells.     

论拉尔夫·艾里森《看不见的人》的幽默艺术

拉尔夫·艾里森的小说《看不见的人》是美国黑人小说史上里程碑式的著作。小说中不仅穿插着具有非洲民间特色的传统幽默,给人忍俊不禁的幽默效果,更多是带有美国黑色幽默特征的现代幽默变式,给人一种苦笑后的沉重感。本文将分述两种幽默在文中的表现途径,分析幽默所具有的审美功能,最后探究作者采用幽默作为表现手法的原因及其对后世的影响。     

爵士乐的和谐之音——论爵士乐对拉尔夫·埃利森创作的影响

19世纪末,爵士乐在美国兴起,受到美国白人和黑人的欢迎.美国黑人作家拉尔夫·埃利森从中学时代就开始接触爵士乐,深受其影响.从爵士乐产生的背景入手,分析爵士乐对埃利森创作的影响,并深入探寻爵士乐所传达出的融合思想在埃利森的两部重要小说《无形人》和《六月庆典》中的体现,对研究埃利森的作品具有重要意义.