The Notorious Jumping Frog Of Calaveras County: A Literary Analysis

The Victorian Age; the Industrial Revolution and the Civil War in America, all played a role in the shift of literary styles from the Romantics to the Realists. At the time preceding the Civil War, realists wrote about the apparent human condition in fiction and non-fiction form, portraying an accurate depiction of the people and events of that time. Along with this literary form, there was a new style of writing that became known as Regionalism. This new style used local "settings, customs and dialects" (Bedford 331). This regionalism depicts the life and times of a less educated, common, lower class fragment of society. One such writer of this style was Mark Twain, who wrote from a regionalist's standpoint in his depiction of the American Old West of California. He wrote as a western humorist, detailing out-of-proportion tales and folklore, of people indicative of the new territory. Twain's creative use of western colloquial diction heightens his reader's sense of region in his writing entitled "The Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras County".

Simon's use of bad diction as he describes Jim Smiley as being the "curiosest man"(184), reveals to the reader Smiley's uneducated colloquial