Author: Mark Twain
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780841419681
Category : Authorship
Languages : en
Pages : 29

Get Book Here

Book Description

Author: Brander Matthews
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Authorship
Languages : en
Pages : 643

Get Book Here

Book Description

Author: Henry B. Wonham
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0195078012
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 218

Get Book Here

Book Description
Mark Twain and the Art of the Tall Tale explores a predominantly American comic strategy and its role in Mark Twain's fiction. Focusing on the writer's experiments with narrative structure, Wonham describes how Twain manipulated conventional approaches to reading and writing by engaging his audience in a series of rhetorical games - the rules of which he adapted from the conventions of the tall tale in American oral and written traditions. After surveying the rich history of yarn-spinning in America, Wonham traces Twain's appropriation of the genre through the course of his career, from The Innocents Abroad to Tom Sawyer, Huck Finn, and Pudd'nhead Wilson. He contends that as Twain turned from short sketches to extended travelogues and quasi-fiction, he found in the tall tale a means of dramatizing his disparate comic material. Later, as Twain worked consciously to purge his writing of its anecdotal quality, the oral genre remained central to his imagination - less as a source of comic material than as a paradigmatic encounter between competing points of view, an encounter that resonates throughout the author's major fiction. Offering an original interpretation of Twain's narrative and rhetorical techniques, this absorbing and readable study will interest Twain enthusiasts and students of nineteenth-century American literature, as well as anyone interested in American humor and oral narrative traditions.

Author: Samuel Langhorne Clemens
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 29

Get Book Here

Book Description

Author: Douglas Anderson
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1501329561
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 301

Get Book Here

Book Description
The Introspective Art of Mark Twain is a major new assessment of a towering American writer. Seeking to trace the development of Mark Twain's imagination, Douglas Anderson begins near the end of Twain's life, with the long dialogue What Is Man? that Twain published anonymously in 1906. In Twain's view, the little-read What Is Man? lies at the heart of his creative life. It is the central aesthetic testament that he employed to tell the story of his artistic evolution. Anderson follows the contours of that story as it unfolds over Twain's career. The portrait that emerges addresses the full scope of Twain's achievement, drawing on his autobiographical and travel writings, as well as the published and unpublished works of fiction that are by now deeply embedded in the world literary canon. “Steer by the river in your head,” Mark Twain's master pilot, Horace Bixby, once advised him, when the opaque atmosphere of the outer world made it impossible to see the actual Mississippi through which Twain was trying to guide his steamboat. For the purposes of this book, the river in one's head is not a mental construct of the physical world but the riverine networks of consciousness itself: the river that is the mind. The detailed discussions of individual books that structure each chapter direct the attention of Mark Twain's students and admirers, through inward rather than outward channels, toward a fuller appreciation for his legacy.

Author: Mark Twain
Publisher: Strelbytskyy Multimedia Publishing
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 12

Get Book Here

Book Description
On the Decay of the Art of Lying is a short essay written by Mark Twain in 1885 for a meeting of the Historical and Antiquarian Club of Hartford, Connecticut. In the essay, Twain laments the dour ways in which men of America's Gilded Age employ man's "most faithfull friend." He concludes by insisting that: "the wise thing is for us diligently to train ourselves to lie thoughtfully, judiciously; to lie with a good object, and not an evil one; to lie for others' advantage, and not our own; to lie healingly, charitably, humanely, not cruelly, hurtfully, maliciously; to lie gracefully and graciously, not awkwardly and clumsily; to lie firmly, frankly, squarely, with head erect, not haltingly, tortuously, with pusillanimous mien, as being ashamed of our high calling." Among the most significant works Mark Twain: The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today, The Prince and the Pauper, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, The American Claimant, Pudd'nhead Wilson, Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc, A Horse's Tale, The Mysterious Stranger, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Tom Sawyer Abroad, Tom Sawyer, Detective, "Schoolhouse Hill", The Mysterious Stranger, "Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer among the Indians", "Huck Finn", "Tom Sawyer’s Conspiracy", "Tom Sawyer’s Gang Plans a Naval Battle".

Author: Mark Twain
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781499731965
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 30

Get Book Here

Book Description
Contents HOW TO TELL A STORY THE WOUNDED SOLDIER. THE GOLDEN ARM. MENTAL TELEGRAPHY AGAIN THE INVALID'S STORY "I do not claim that I can tell a story as it ought to be told. I only claim to know how a story ought to be told, for I have been almost daily in the company of the most expert story-tellers for many years. There are several kinds of stories, but only one difficult kind--the humorous. I will talk mainly about that one. The humorous story is American, the comic story is English, the witty story is French. The humorous story depends for its effect upon the manner of the telling; the comic story and the witty story upon the matter. The humorous story may be spun out to great length, and may wander around as much as it pleases, and arrive nowhere in particular; but the comic and witty stories must be brief and end with a point. The humorous story bubbles gently along, the others burst. The humorous story is strictly a work of art--high and delicate art--and only an artist can tell it; but no art is necessary in telling the comic and the witty story; anybody can do it. The art of telling a humorous story--understand, I mean by word of mouth, not print--was created in America, and has remained at home."

Author: Mark Twain
Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform
ISBN: 9781986249171
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 26

Get Book Here

Book Description
On the Decay of the Art of Lying is a short essay written by Mark Twain in 1880 for a meeting of the Historical and Antiquarian Club of Hartford, Connecticut. Twain published the text in The Stolen White Elephant Etc. (1882). In the essay, Twain laments the four ways in which men of America's Gilded Age employ man's 'most faithful friend'. He concludes by insisting that: the wise thing is for us diligently to train ourselves to lie thoughtfully, judiciously; to lie with a good object, and not an evil one; to lie for others' advantage, and not our own; to lie healingly, charitably, humanely, not cruelly, hurtfully, maliciously; to lie gracefully and graciously, not awkwardly and clumsily; to lie firmly, frankly, squarely, with head erect, not haltingly, tortuously, with pusillanimous mien, as being ashamed of our high calling.

Author: Mark Twain
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520271521
Category : Humor
Languages : en
Pages : 338

Get Book Here

Book Description
"For those unaware—as I was until I read this book—that Mark Twain was one of America's early animal advocates, Shelley Fisher Fishkin's collection of his writings on animals will come as a revelation. Many of these pieces are as fresh and lively as when they were first written, and it's wonderful to have them gathered in one place." —Peter Singer, author of Animal Liberation and The Life You Can Save “A truly exhilarating work. Mark Twain's animal-friendly views would not be out of place today, and indeed, in certain respects, Twain is still ahead of us: claiming, correctly, that there are certain degraded practices that only humans inflict on one another and upon other animals. Fishkin has done a splendid job: I cannot remember reading something so consistently excellent."—Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, author of When Elephants Weep and The Face on Your Plate "Shelley Fisher Fishkin has given us the lifelong arc of the great man's antic, hilarious, and subtly profound explorations of the animal world, and she's guided us through it with her own trademark wit and acumen. Dogged if she hasn't." —Ron Powers, author of Dangerous Water: A Biography of the Boy Who Became Mark Twain and Mark Twain: A Life

Author: Mark Twain
Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform
ISBN: 9781718741645
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 258

Get Book Here

Book Description
On the Decay of the Art of Lying is a short essay by Mark Twain from 1885. In it he deplores that way man's "most faithful friend" is being used and indeed misused, declaring that "the wise thing is for us diligently to train ourselves to lie thoughtfully, judiciously; to lie with a good object, and not an evil one; to lie for others' advantage, and not our own; to lie healingly, charitably, humanely, not cruelly, hurtfully, maliciously; to lie gracefully and graciously, not awkwardly and clumsily; to lie firmly, frankly, squarely, with head erect, not haltingly, tortuously, with pusillanimous mien, as being ashamed of our high calling." Although Mark Twain is revered as a master of American fiction, he was also known in his time for possessing a remarkable facility with the essay form. This collection of surprisingly insightful non-fiction and fiction pieces showcases Twain's astounding breadth as a writer. A must-read for fans of Twain's no-nonsense prose.