Abstract

    Sherwood Anderson is one of the founders of American realistic literature, regarded as the pioneer in modern American literature history. American literary masters, Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner, stated outright that Anderson’s works gave them a lot of inspiration. Anderson created a lot of masterworks in American literature history, especially Winesburg, Ohio, which was rooted in American soil. This paper intends to analyze the grotesque features of Winesburg, Ohio, consisting of grotesque theme, characters and settings, in order to explore the contribution of the grotesque features to the expression of the theme, with the purpose of making a better understanding the grotesque features in the book.
 
Key words:  grotesque, distorted relationship, loneliness, alienation, industrialization

摘 要

    舍伍德•安德森是美国现实主义的创始人之一，被认为是美国现代文学史上的先驱者，美国的大作家福克纳、海明威等都直言曾经受到安德森作品的启发。在美国文学史上，他留下了许多杰作，特别是这部根植于美国土壤的作品——《小城畸人》。本文分析了作品中的怪诞主义特色,包括怪诞的主题、角色和场景设置，进而剖析怪诞主义对刻画小说主题思想的作用，以突出安德森是如何将他对于现实世界的认识与感悟浓缩到充满怪诞色彩的小城中的，使读者更全面、客观地把握《小城畸人》创作艺术的怪诞性。

关键词： 畸人；扭曲的关系；孤独；疏远; 工业化

1.    Introduction
Speaking of the American literary masters from 1920s to 1930s, people tend to blurt out Ernest Hemingway, Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, etc., but few would mention Sherwood Anderson. Nevertheless, Faulkner stated that Anderson was “the father of my generation of American writers and the tradition of American writing which our successors will carry on”. Anderson has also been called “a writer’s writer” by famous critic Malcolm Cowley. Therefore, Anderson had made profound influence on a large number of American modern and contemporary writers mentioned above. Throughout his writing career, he wrote several novels, but he is mainly famous for his short fictions, which include Winesburg, Ohio.
Artistically, the book represents the daily life pictures of the grotesques who are weird and psychologically deformed because of loneliness and setbacks. It has so enormous influence that it has been rated as “the milestone of American short fiction in the 20th century”. In the book, Anderson makes a vivid description of the grotesques’ incomplete and eccentric psychological activities and states in the form of heart monologues, free association and psychological analysis, which truly represent the grotesques’ feeling of disillusion, depression, loneliness and alienation, and also deepen the theme.