"The Celebrated Jumping Frogs of Calaveras County"

"The Celebrated Jumping Frogs of Calaveras County" its written by the famous Mark Twain, who, let's face it, is basically the posterboy for Regionalism. He was a key author of the Regionalism movement, and is probably the most famous and recognized as well. He was very good at writing the local dialect for a story and keeping with the vernacular of the area (Campbell "Regionalism"). The characters in "The Celebrated Jumping Frogs of Calaveras County" speak with a Southern drawl, and do the stereotypical thing where they do not modify their verbs into the proper tense (Twain). Which, honestly, was often true in the real world, especially during Mark Twain's time. And people still do it now, which is actually really sad. There is a lot of this "local dialect", but that is a part of Regionalism that I definitely do not like, because it can be pretty diffucult to read things written by Mark Twain simply because the dialogue between the characters and because we are not used to that kind of speech (Twain).

Other elements of Realism are definitely present as well because events that happen in real life or that could easily happen are depicted, like jumping frog contests and the goofing off that the characters do. Jim Smiley took the form of the hero in this hero, at least in the terms of Realism, because he was very ordinary with both good traits and bad (Campbell "Realism").

But while Realism and Regionalism both play a large part in the story, Naturalism seems to be missing apart from descriptions of some nature that surronds the events of the story. There is also no substantial mention of God or any other kind supernatural or divine power, which honestly gives the story a more easy going quality because I think that stories that don't drag religion out into the open are more universal and often more entertaining and enjoyable for the reader.

Campbell, Donna M. "Realism in American Literature, 1860-1890." Literary Movements. Dept. of English, Washington State University. Web 21 March 2010.
http://www.wsu.edu/~campbelld/amlit/realism.htm

Campbell, Donna M. "Regionalism and Local Color Fiction, 1865-1895." Literary Movements. Dept. of English, Washington State University. Web. Feb 10 2011.
http://www.wsu.edu/~campbelld/amlit/lcolor.html

Twain, Mark. "The Celebrated Jumping Frogs of Calaveras County." Glencoe Literature. Ed. Jeffrey Wilhelm. American Literature ed. Colombus: McGraw-Hill, 2010. 498-502. Print.