Mark Twain and the Tall Tale Imagination in Nineteenth-century America PDF Download
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Author: James Edward Caron
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : American wit and humor
Languages : en
Pages : 696
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Book Description
Author: James Edward Caron
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : American wit and humor
Languages : en
Pages : 696
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Book Description
Author: Henry B. Wonham
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0195078012
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 218
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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: Henry B. Wonham
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0195360192
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 218
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Book Description
Mark Twain and the Art of the Tall Tale is a study of a peculiar 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 tall tale in American oral and written traditions. Wonham goes on to show how Twain's appropriation of the genre developed through the course of his career, from The Innocents Abroad to Tom Sawyer, Huck Finn, and Pudd'nhead Wilson. This eminently 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: Joseph L. Coulombe
Publisher: University of Missouri Press
ISBN: 082621956X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 198
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Book Description
In Mark Twain and the American West, Joseph Coulombe explores how Mark Twain deliberately manipulated contemporary conceptions of the American West to create and then modify a public image that eventually won worldwide fame. He establishes the central role of the western region in the development of a persona that not only helped redefine American manhood and literary celebrity in the late nineteenth century, but also produced some of the most complex and challenging writings in the American canon. Coulombe sheds new light on previously underappreciated components of Twain's distinctly western persona. Gathering evidence from contemporary newspapers, letters, literature, and advice manuals, Coulombe shows how Twain's persona in the early 1860s as a hard-drinking, low-living straight-talker was an implicit response to western conventions of manhood. He then traces the author's movement toward a more sophisticated public image, arguing that Twain characterized language and authorship in the same manner that he described western men: direct, bold, physical, even violent. In this way, Twain capitalized upon common images of the West to create himself as a new sort of western outlaw--one who wrote. Coulombe outlines Twain's struggle to find the proper balance between changing cultural attitudes toward male respectability and rebellion and his own shifting perceptions of the East and the West. Focusing on the tension between these goals, Coulombe explores Twain's emergence as the moneyed and masculine man-of-letters, his treatment of American Indians in its relation to his depiction of Jim in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, the enigmatic connection of Huck Finn to the natural world, and Twain's profound influence on Willa Cather's western novels. Mark Twain and the American West is sure to generate new interest and discussion about Mark Twain and his influence. By understanding how conventions of the region, conceptions of money and class, and constructions of manhood intersect with the creation of Twain's persona, Coulombe helps us better appreciate the writer's lasting effect on American thought and literature through the twentieth century and into the twenty-first.
Author: Mark Twain
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 9780520914636
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 1122
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Book Description
Based on Mark Twain's own years of "variegated vagabonding" in the West, this comic narrative offers a virtual grab-bag of tall tales, folklore, beast fables, travelogue, local color, autobiography, history, geography--even statistics. This new critical edition of Roughing Itsupersedes the 1972 edition published in the Works of Mark Twain over twenty years ago. It is an entirely new undertaking, by a different group of editors. Together they have made extensive use of newly discovered historical and textual materials, particularly biographical documents which illuminate how Mark Twain gave literary shape to his actual experiences in the West. This edition includes the more than 300 illustrations Mark Twain commissioned for his book. It also provides six new maps: two for Nevada in the 1860s and four to help trace the Clemens brothers' cross-country stagecoach route. The editors provide a comprehensive introduction that will supplant all previous accounts of how Mark Twain wrote and revised his second long book. Fully supplemented by the textual apparatus, the edition presents a complete record of Twain's revisions and is sure to become the standard text of Mark Twain's great Western adventure. Editorial work was funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities and by a generous gift from the L. J. Skaggs and Mary C. Skaggs Foundation.
Author: Mark Twain
Publisher: Library of America
ISBN: 9780940450820
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 1068
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Book Description
In the three novels collected in this Library of America volume, Mark Twain turned his comic genius to a period that fascinated and repelled him in equal measure: medieval and Renaissance Europe. This lost world of stately pomp and unspeakable cruelty, artistic splendor and abysmal ignorance—the seeming opposite of brashly optimistic, commercial, democratic nineteenth-century America—engaged Twain’s imagination, inspiring a children’s classic, and astonishing fantasy of comedy and violence, and an unusual fictional biography. Twain drew on his fascination with impersonation and the theme of the double in The Prince and the Pauper (1882), which brilliantly uses the device of identical boys from opposite ends of the social hierarchy to evoke the tumultuous contrasts of Henry VIII’s England. As the pauper Tom Canty is raised to the throne, while the rightful heir is cast out among thieves and beggars, Twain sustains one of his most compelling narratives. A perennial children’s favorite, the novel brings an impassioned American point of view to the injustices of traditional European society. A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889) finds Twain in high satiric form. When hard-headed Yankee mechanic Hank Morgan is knocked out in a fight, he wakes up in Camelot in A.D. 528—and finds himself pitted against the medieval rituals and superstitions of King Arthur and his knights. In a hilarious burlesque of the age of chivalry and of its cult in the nineteenth-century American South, Twain demolishes knighthood’s romantic aura to reveal a brutish, violent society beset by ignorance. But the comic mood gives way to a darker questioning of both ancient and modern society, culminating in an astonishing apocalyptic conclusion that questions both American progress and Yankee “ingenuity” as Camelot is undone by the introduction of advanced technology. “Taking into account . . . her origin, youth, sex, illiteracy, early environment, and the obstructing conditions under which she exploited her high gifts and made her conquest in the field and before the courts that tried her for her life—she is easily and by far the most extraordinary person the human race has ever known.” So Twain wrote of the heroine of Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc (1896), his most elaborate work of historical reconstruction. A respectful and richly detailed chronicle, by turns admiring and indignant, Joan of Arc opens a fascinating window onto the moral imagination of America’s greatest comic writer. LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.
Author: Mark Twain
Publisher: BoD - Books on Demand
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 42
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Book Description
"A Horse's Tale" is a unique and humorous work by Mark Twain, narrated from the perspective of Buffalo Bill's horse. The story is set in the American West during the late 19th century and provides a satirical look at the events and characters of that time. The novel's central character is Soldier Boy, Buffalo Bill's prized horse, who offers a witty and often sardonic commentary on the adventures and misadventures he experiences while serving as the steed of the famous frontiersman. Through Soldier Boy's eyes, readers are exposed to the quirks and foibles of the human characters he encounters, including Buffalo Bill himself, as well as Native American tribes, military figures, and various other individuals. As Soldier Boy recounts his various escapades, the novel touches on themes such as the clash of cultures in the American West, the treatment of Native Americans, and the absurdities of human behavior. Twain's signature humor and wit are on full display as he uses the horse's perspective to lampoon societal norms and human folly. "A Horse's Tale" is not as well-known as some of Twain's other works, but it offers an entertaining and unconventional narrative that provides insight into the author's satirical style and his fascination with the American frontier. It's a delightful read for those interested in Twain's unique storytelling and his ability to view the world through an unexpected lens.
Author:
Publisher:
ISBN: 9788185848129
Category : American fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 134
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Book Description
Papers presented at the Seminar on "Mark Twain and Nineteenth Century American Fiction", in November 1991, organized by American Studies Research Centre.
Author: Lawrence Howe
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521561686
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 286
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Book Description
This book provides a fresh look at Twain's major novels such as Life on the Mississippi, Huckleberry Finn and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court.
Author: John McCormick
Publisher: Transaction Publishers
ISBN: 9781412819176
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 348
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Book Description
Catastrophe and Imagination explores fiction in America and England from 1870 to 1950, measuring the impact of the twentieth century's wars on the literary imagination. McCormick holds that the novel has a unique relationship to society, and defines this in relation to the many catastrophes of his era - wars, revolutions, and other outrages on the social order. After an initial survey of society in the novels of Jane Austen, Dickens, and Thackeray, to name only a few, he analyzes what the novel is not, with reference to the work of Virginia Woolf, John Steinbeck, and D. H. Lawrence.
