Author: Joe B. Fulton
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 0807138045
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 254
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Book Description
Samuel Langhorne Clemens, who later achieved fame as the writer Mark Twain, served as second lieutenant in a Confederate militia, but only for two weeks, leading many to describe his loyalty to the Confederate cause as halfhearted at best. In The Reconstruction of Mark Twain, Joe B. Fulton challenges these long-held assumptions about Twain's advocacy of the Union cause, arguing that Clemens traveled a long and arduous path, moving from pro-slavery, secession, and the Confederacy to pro-union, and racially enlightened. A deft blend of biography, history, and literary studies, this book offers a bold new assessment of the work of one of America's most celebrated writers.
Author: Mark Twain
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 052090575X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 814
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Book Description
This collection brings together for the first time more than 360 of Mark Twain's short works written between 1851, the year of his first extant sketch, and 1871, when he renounced his ties with the Buffalo Express and the Galaxy, resolving to "write but little for periodicals hereafter." In October 1871 Clemens and his family moved to Hartford, where they would live until 1891. No longer a journalist, he was about to complete his second full-length book, Roughing It. The literary apprenticeship that he had begun twenty years before in the print shops of Hannibal, and pursued in the newspaper offices of Virginia City, San Francisco, and Buffalo, had at last come to a close. The selections included in these volumes represent a generous sampling from Mark Twain's most imaginative journalism, a few set speeches, a few poems, and hundreds of tales and sketches recovered from more than fifty newspapers and journals, as well as two dozen unpublished items of various description—the main body of what can now be found of his early literary and subliterary work, though by no means everything written during those twenty years of experimentation. The selections are ordered chronologically and therefore provide a nearly continuous record of the author's literary activity from his earliest juvenilia up through the mature work that he published in the Galaxy, the Buffalo Express, and many other journals.
Author: Mark Twain
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520906071
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 704
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Book Description
Here is young Sam Clemens—in the world, getting famous, making love—in 155 magnificently edited letters that trace his remarkable self-transformation from a footloose, irreverent West Coast journalist to a popular lecturer and author of The Jumping Frog, soon to be a national and international celebrity. And on the move he was—from San Francisco to New York, to St. Louis, and then to Paris, Naples, Rome, Athens, Constantinople, Yalta, and the Holy Land; back to New York and on to Washington; back to San Francisco and Virginia City; and on to lecturing in Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and New York. Resplendent with wit, love of life, ambition, and literary craft, this new volume in the wonderful Bancroft Library edition of Mark Twain's Letters will delight and inform both scholars and general readers. This volume has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Mark Twain Foundation, Jane Newhall, and The Friends of The Bancroft Library.
Author: Erik Redling
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110587645
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 712
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Book Description
The American short story has always been characterized by exciting aesthetic innovations and an immense range of topics. This handbook offers students and researchers a comprehensive introduction to the multifaceted genre with a special focus on recent developments due to the rise of new media. Part I provides systematic overviews of significant contexts ranging from historical-political backgrounds, short story theories developed by writers, print and digital culture, to current theoretical approaches and canon formation. Part II consists of 35 paired readings of representative short stories by eminent authors, charting major steps in the evolution of the American short story from its beginnings as an art form in the early nineteenth century up to the digital age. The handbook examines historically, methodologically, and theoretically the coming together of the enduring narrative practice of compression and concision in American literature. It offers fresh and original readings relevant to studying the American short story and shows how the genre performs American culture.
Author: Mark Twain
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520203607
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 828
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Book Description
"You ought to see Livy & me, now-a-days—you never saw such a serenely satisfied couple of doves in all your life. I spent Jan 1, 2, 3 & 5 there, & left at 8 last night. With my vile temper & variable moods, it seems an incomprehensible miracle that we two have been right together in the same house half the time for a year & a half, & yet have never had a cross word, or a lover's 'tiff,' or a pouting spell, or a misunderstanding, or the faintest shadow of a jealous suspicion. Now isn't that absolutely wonderful? Could I have had such an experience with any other girl on earth? I am perfectly certain I could not. . . . We are to be married on Feb. 2d." So begins Volume 4 of the letters, with Samuel Clemens anticipating his wedding to Olivia L. Langdon. The 338 letters in this volume document the first two years of a loving marriage that would last more than thirty years. They recount, in Clemens's own inimitable voice, a tumultuous time: a growing international fame, the birth of a sickly first child, and the near-fatal illness of his wife. At the beginning of 1870, fresh from the success of The Innocents Abroad, Clemens is on "the long agony" of a lecture tour and planning to settle in Buffalo as editor of the Express. By the end of 1871, he has moved to Hartford and is again on tour, anticipating the publication of Roughing It and the birth of his second child. The intervening letters show Clemens bursting with literary ideas, business schemes, and inventions, and they show him erupting with frustration, anger, and grief, but more often with dazzling humor and surprising self-revelation. In addition to Roughing It, Clemens wrote some enduringly popular short pieces during this period, but he saved some of his best writing for private letters, many of which are published here for the first time.
Author: Joe B. Fulton
Publisher: Ohio State University Press
ISBN: 0814210244
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 242
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Book Description
"I was made in His image," Mark Twain once said, "but have never been mistaken for Him." God may have made Mark Twain in His image, but Twain frequently remade himself by adopting divine personae as part of his literary burlesque. Readers were delighted, rather than fooled, when Twain adopted the image of religious vocation throughout his writing career: Theologian, Missionary, Priest, Preacher, Prophet, Saint, Brother Twain, Holy Samuel, the Bishop of New Jersey, and of course, the Reverend Mark Twain. Joe B. Fulton has not written a study of Samuel Langhorne Clemens's religious beliefs, but rather one about Twain's use of theological form and content in a number of his works-some well-known, others not so widely read. Twain adopted such religious personae to burlesque the religious literary genres associated with those vocations. He wrote catechisms, prophecies, psalms, and creeds, all in the theological tradition, but with a comic twist. Twain even wrote a burlesque life of Christ that has the son of God sporting blue jeans and cowboy boots. With his distinctive comic genius, Twain entered the religious dialogue of his time, employing the genres of belief as his vehicle for criticizing church and society. Twain's burlesques of religious form and content reveal a writer fully engaged with the religious ferment of his day. Works like The Innocents Abroad, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc, Roughing It, and What Is Man? are the productions of a writer skilled at adopting and adapting established literary and religious forms for his own purposes. Twain is sometimes viewed as a haphazard writer, but in The Reverend Mark Twain, Fulton demonstrates how carefully Twain studied established literary and theological genres to entertain-and criticize-his society. Book jacket.
Author: Shelley Fisher Fishkin
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190285257
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 403
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Book Description
Mark Twain (born Samuel Clemens), a former printer's apprentice, journalist, steamboat pilot, and miner, remains to this day one of the most enduring and beloved of America's great writers. Combining cultural criticism with historical scholarship, A Historical Guide to Mark Twain addresses a wide range of topics relevant to Twain's work, including religion, commerce, race, gender, social class, and imperialism. Like all of the Historical Guides to American Authors, this volume includes an introduction, a brief biography, a bibliographic essay, and an illustrated chronology of the author's life and times.
Author: Ann M. Ryan
Publisher: University of Missouri Press
ISBN: 0826266657
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 288
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Book Description
Cosmopolitan Twain takes seriously Mark Twain's life as a citizen of urban landscapes: from the streets of New York City to the palaces of Vienna to the suburban utopia of Hartford. Traditional readings of Mark Twain orient his life and work by distinctly rural markers such as the Mississippi River, the Wild West, and small-town America; yet, as this collection shows, Twain's sensibilities were equally formed in the urban centers of the world. These essays represent Twain both as a product of urban frontiers and as a prophet of American modernity, situating him squarely within the context of an evolving international and cosmopolitan community. As Twain traveled and lived in these locales, he acquired languages, costumes, poses, and politics that made him one of the first truly cosmopolitan world citizens. Beginning with New York City--where Twain spent more of his life than in Hannibal--we learn that his early experiences there fed his fascination with racial identity and economic privilege. While in St. Louis and New Orleans, Twain developed a strategic detachment that became a part of his cosmopolitan persona. His contact with bohemian writers in San Francisco excited his ambitions to become more than a humorist, while sojourns in Buffalo and Hartford marked Twain's uneasy accommodation to domesticity and cultural prominence. London finally liberated him from his narrowly constructed national identity, while Vienna allowed him to fully achieve his transnational voice. The volume ends by presenting Elmira, New York, as a complement, and something of a counterpart, to Twain's cosmopolitan life, creating a domestic retreat from the pace and complexity of an increasingly urban, modern America. In response to each of these cities, Twain generated writings that marked America's movement into the twentieth century and toward the darker realities that made possible this cosmopolitan state. Cosmopolitan Twain presents Twain's eventual descent into skepticism and despair not as a departure from his early values but rather as a dark awakening into the new terms of American identity, history, and moral authority. This collection reveals a writer who is decidedly less static than the iconic portrait that dominates popular culture. It offers a corrective to the familiar image of Twain as the nostalgic voice of America's rural past, presenting Twain as a citizen of modernity and a visionary of a global and cosmopolitan future.
Author: Ron Powers
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1847395996
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 1176
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Book Description
Twain's story is epic, comic and tragic. To retrace it all in illuminating detail, Powers draws on the tens of thousands of Twain's letters and on his astonishing journal entries - many of which are quoted here for the first time. Twain left Missouri for a life on the Mississippi during the golden age of steamboats, enjoyed an uproariously drunken newspaper career in the Nevada of the Wild West, and witnessed and joined the extremes of wealth and poverty of New York City and of the Gilded Age. Through it all he observed, borrowed, stole and combined the characters he met into the voice of America's greatest literature, attracting throngs of fans wherever his undying lust for wandering took him. From Twain's wicked satire to his relationships with the likes of Ulysses Grant, this is a brilliantly written story that astounds, amuses and edifies as only a great life can.
Author: Potsdam Public Museum (Potsdam, N.Y.)
Publisher: Arcadia Publishing
ISBN: 9780738536507
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 1014
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Book Description
Red sandstone, lumber, paper, cows, and college students feature prominently in Potsdam. With its selection of two hundred stunning photographs, the book records aspects of life in Potsdam from the mid-1800s to the mid-1900s. Located on the Racquette River between the St. Lawrence River and the Adirondack Mountains, the town is one often that were created in 1787 to promote settlement of New York State. Education has played an important role in Potsdam since 1816, when St. Lawrence Academy opened. The success of the academy led to the establishment in 1866 of a normal school, the forerunner of Potsdam College, with its renowned Crane School of Music.
