Sentimentality. Sentimentality is an excessive expression of emotion. As you read, look for moments of sentimentality in the story.
Stereotypical or Stock Character. A stereotypical, or stock character is one who does not deviate from conventional expectations of such a character. Identify the stock characters you find in the story.
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“The Outcasts of Poker Flat” is an example of nineteenth-century regional literature. Regional writers portray what is special about a particular part of the country. They write about the specific landscape, people, values, and modes of life of a region. Regionalists explore issues that are common to all human beings, but they do so only by way of writing about a particular time and place.
In “The Outcasts of Poker Flat,” Harte treats the conflict between a society and its “outcasts,” those people whose behavior is unacceptable to the moral values that the majority at least pretend to uphold. Harte explores this timeless conflict by describing the fate of some typical characters from the American frontier. Today these characters are familiar to anyone who watches Western movies, but in the nineteenth century they were new, and Harte was one of the first to describe them.
In your opinion, who are the outcasts in our society?
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