Sentimental Twain

Sentimental Twain PDF Author: Gregg Camfield
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 1512807133
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 296

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Book Description
In Sentimental Twain, Gregg Camfield examines the major and minor works of Mark Twain to redraw the boundaries between sentimentalism and realism in the second half of the nineteenth century. Beginning by taking the reactions to the question of race in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn as a test case, Camfield reveals that sentimental ethics persist, though buried, in American culture, and he argues that Americans' ambivalent responses to sentimentalism explain some of the continuing controversy surrounding Mark Twain's work. Specifically, he contends, insofar as the liberal agenda remains substantially sentimental—especially when dealing with issues of race—today's readers of Twain participate in the same dialectic between sentimental compassion and realistic cynicism that Twain himself confronted. Camfield then traces the cultural development of this ethical dialectic and follows Mark Twain's reactions to it, showing that Twain was a closet sentimentalist whose public attacks on sentimentalism veiled a deep longing for a more compassionate world. Throughout, Sentimental Twain is grounded in a discussion of philosophical contexts of nineteenth-century American sentimental literature, paying particular attention to the Scottish Common Sense philosophers but looking forward to the Pragmatism of William James.

Sentimental Twain

Sentimental Twain PDF Author: Gregg Camfield
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 1512807133
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 296

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Book Description
In Sentimental Twain, Gregg Camfield examines the major and minor works of Mark Twain to redraw the boundaries between sentimentalism and realism in the second half of the nineteenth century. Beginning by taking the reactions to the question of race in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn as a test case, Camfield reveals that sentimental ethics persist, though buried, in American culture, and he argues that Americans' ambivalent responses to sentimentalism explain some of the continuing controversy surrounding Mark Twain's work. Specifically, he contends, insofar as the liberal agenda remains substantially sentimental—especially when dealing with issues of race—today's readers of Twain participate in the same dialectic between sentimental compassion and realistic cynicism that Twain himself confronted. Camfield then traces the cultural development of this ethical dialectic and follows Mark Twain's reactions to it, showing that Twain was a closet sentimentalist whose public attacks on sentimentalism veiled a deep longing for a more compassionate world. Throughout, Sentimental Twain is grounded in a discussion of philosophical contexts of nineteenth-century American sentimental literature, paying particular attention to the Scottish Common Sense philosophers but looking forward to the Pragmatism of William James.

The Sentimental Touch:The Language of Feeling in the Age of Managerialism

The Sentimental Touch:The Language of Feeling in the Age of Managerialism PDF Author: Aaron Ritzenberg
Publisher: Fordham Univ Press
ISBN: 0823245527
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 193

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Book Description
The Sentimental Touch' explores the strange, enduring power of sentimental language in the face of a rapidly changing culture.

The Cambridge Companion to Mark Twain

The Cambridge Companion to Mark Twain PDF Author: Forrest G. Robinson
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521445931
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
The Cambridge Companion to Mark Twain offers new and thought provoking essays on an author of enduring pre-eminence in the American canon. The book is a collaborative project, assembled by scholars who have played crucial roles in the recent explosion of Twain criticism. Accessible enough to interest both experienced specialists and students new to Twain criticism, the essays examine Twain from a wide variety of critical perspectives, and include timely reflections by major critics on the hotly debated dynamics of race and slavery perceptible throughout his writing. The volume includes a chronology of Twain's life and a list of suggestions for further reading, to provide the students or general reader with sources for background as well as additional information.

Emotional Reinventions

Emotional Reinventions PDF Author: Melanie V Dawson
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 0472121154
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
Focusing on representational approaches to emotion during the years of American literary realism’s dominance and in the works of such authors as Edith Wharton, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, W. D. Howells, Charles Chesnutt, and others, Emotional Reinventions: Realist-Era Representations Beyond Sympathy contends that emotional representations were central to the self-conscious construction of high realism (in the mid-1880s) and to the interrogation of its boundaries. Based on realist-era authors’ rejection of “sentimentalism” and its reduction of emotional diversity (a tendency to stress what Karen Sanchez-Eppler has described as sentimental fiction’s investment in “overcoming difference”), Melanie Dawson argues that realist-era investments in emotional detail were designed to confront differences of class, gender, race, and circumstance directly. She explores the ways in which representational practices that approximate scientific methods often led away from scientific theories and rejected rigid attempts at creating emotional taxonomies. She argues that ultimately realist-era authors demonstrated a new investment in individuated emotional histories and experiences that sought to honor all affective experiences on their own terms.

Sentimental Collaborations

Sentimental Collaborations PDF Author: Mary Louise Kete
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 9780822324713
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 308

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Book Description
Focusing on the genre of poetry, Kete argues that sentimentality functioned within the American Romantic period as a mode by which subjects fashioned a system of values which tended to define middle-class in the19th century.

The Routledge Encyclopedia of Mark Twain

The Routledge Encyclopedia of Mark Twain PDF Author: J. R. LeMaster
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0415890586
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 882

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Book Description
This encyclopedia includes more than 700 alphabetically arranged entries that cover a full variety of topics on Mark Twain's life, intellectual milieu, literary career, and achievements.

A Companion to Mark Twain

A Companion to Mark Twain PDF Author: Peter Messent
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1119045398
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 597

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Book Description
This broad-ranging companion brings together respected American and European critics and a number of up-and-coming scholars to provide an overview of Twain, his background, his writings, and his place in American literary history. One of the most broad-ranging volumes to appear on Mark Twain in recent years Brings together respected Twain critics and a number of younger scholars in the field to provide an overview of this central figure in American literature Places special emphasis on the ways in which Twain's works remain both relevant and important for a twenty-first century audience A concluding essay evaluates the changing landscape of Twain criticism

Mark Twain & Company

Mark Twain & Company PDF Author: Leland Krauth
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 9780820325408
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 334

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Book Description
In this comparison of Mark Twain with six of his literary contemporaries, Leland Krauth looks anew at the writer's multifaceted creativity. Twain, a highly lettered man immersed in the literary culture of his time, viewed himself as working within a community of writers. He likened himself to a guild member whose work was the crafted product of a common trade--and sometimes made with borrowed materials. Yet there have been few studies of Twain in relation to his fellow guild members. In Mark Twain & Company, Krauth examines some creative "sparks and smolderings" ignited by Twain's contact with certain writers, all of whom were published, read, and criticized on both sides of the Atlantic: the Americans Bret Harte, William Dean Howells, and Harriet Beecher Stowe and the British writers Matthew Arnold, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Rudyard Kipling. Each chapter explores the nature of Twain's personal relationship with a writer as well as the literary themes and modes they shared. Krauth looks at the sentimentality of Harte and Twain and its influence on their protest fiction; the humor and social criticism of Twain and Howells; the use of the Gothic by Twain and Stowe to explore racial issues; the role of Victorian Sage assumed by Arnold and Twain to critique civilization; the exploitation of adventure fiction by Twain and Stevenson to reveal conceptions of masculinity; and the use of the picaresque in Kipling and Twain to support or subvert imperialism. Mark Twain & Company casts new light on some of the most enduring writers in English. At the same time it refreshes the debate over the transatlantic nature of Victorianism with new insights about nineteenth-century morality, conventionality, race, corporeality, imperialism, manhood, and individual identity.

Manly Love

Manly Love PDF Author: Axel Nissen
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226586685
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 241

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Book Description
The modern idea of Victorians is that they were emotionless prudes, imprisoned by sexual repression and suffocating social constraints; they expressed love and affection only within the bounds of matrimony—if at all. And yet, a wealth of evidence contradicting this idea has been hiding in plain sight for close to a century. In Manly Love, Axel Nissen turns to the novels and short stories of Victorian America to uncover the widely overlooked phenomenon of passionate friendships between men. Nissen’s examination of the literature of the period brings to light a forgotten genre: the fiction of romantic friendship. Delving into works by Mark Twain, Henry James, William Dean Howells, and others, Nissen identifies the genre’s unique features and explores the connections between romantic friendships in literature and in real life. Situating love between men at the heart of Victorian culture, Nissen radically alters our understanding of the American literary canon. And with its deep insights into the emotional and intellectual life of the period, Manly Love also offers a fresh perspective on nineteenth-century America’s attitudes toward love, friendship, marriage, and sex.

The Introspective Art of Mark Twain

The Introspective Art of Mark Twain PDF Author: Douglas Anderson
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 150132957X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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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.