Mark Twain, American Humorist

Mark Twain, American Humorist PDF Author: Tracy Wuster
Publisher: University of Missouri Press
ISBN: 0826274110
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 502

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Book Description
Mark Twain, American Humorist examines the ways that Mark Twain’s reputation developed at home and abroad in the period between 1865 and 1882, years in which he went from a regional humorist to national and international fame. In the late 1860s, Mark Twain became the exemplar of a school of humor that was thought to be uniquely American. As he moved into more respectable venues in the 1870s, especially through the promotion of William Dean Howells in the Atlantic Monthly, Mark Twain muddied the hierarchical distinctions between class-appropriate leisure and burgeoning forms of mass entertainment, between uplifting humor and debased laughter, and between the literature of high culture and the passing whim of the merely popular.

Mark Twain, American Humorist

Mark Twain, American Humorist PDF Author: Tracy Wuster
Publisher: University of Missouri Press
ISBN: 0826274110
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 502

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Book Description
Mark Twain, American Humorist examines the ways that Mark Twain’s reputation developed at home and abroad in the period between 1865 and 1882, years in which he went from a regional humorist to national and international fame. In the late 1860s, Mark Twain became the exemplar of a school of humor that was thought to be uniquely American. As he moved into more respectable venues in the 1870s, especially through the promotion of William Dean Howells in the Atlantic Monthly, Mark Twain muddied the hierarchical distinctions between class-appropriate leisure and burgeoning forms of mass entertainment, between uplifting humor and debased laughter, and between the literature of high culture and the passing whim of the merely popular.

Mark Twain at the Buffalo Express

Mark Twain at the Buffalo Express PDF Author: Mark Twain
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780875802497
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 309

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Book Description
Hoping to impress his future in-laws with a regular income and a stable lifestyle, in August 1869 Mark Twain acquired part ownership of the Buffalo Express. The Buffalo Express articles in this book mark his transition from journalist, editor, and travel writer, to full-time literary editor.

Mark Twain

Mark Twain PDF Author: Harold H. Kolb
Publisher: University Press of America
ISBN: 0761864210
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 518

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Book Description
Mark Twain is America’s—perhaps the world’s—best known humorous writer. Yet many commentators in his time and our own have thought of humor as merely an attractive surface feature rather than a crucial part of both the meaning and the structure of Twain’s writings. This book begins with a discussion of humor, and then demonstrates how Twain’s artistic strategies, his remarkable achievements, and even his philosophy were bound together in his conception of humor, and how this conception developed across a forty-five year career. Kolb shows that Twain is a writer whose lifelong mode of perception is essentially humorous, a writer who sees the world in the sharp clash of contrast, whose native language is exaggeration, and whose vision unravels and reorganizes our perceptions. Humor, in all its mercurial complexity, is at the center of Mark Twain’s talent, his successes, and his limitations. It is as a humorist—amiably comic, sharply satiric, grimly ironic, simultaneously humorous and serious—that he is best understood.

The Wit and Wisdom of Mark Twain

The Wit and Wisdom of Mark Twain PDF Author: Mark Twain
Publisher: Courier Corporation
ISBN: 048648923X
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 194

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Book Description
"Familiarity breeds contempt — and children." "When angry, count to four; when very angry, swear." "Heaven for climate. Hell for company." This attractive paperback gift edition of the renowned American humorist's epigrams and witticisms features hundreds of quips on life, love, history, culture, travel, and other topics from his fiction, essays, letters, and autobiography.

Mark Twain's Autobiography

Mark Twain's Autobiography PDF Author: Mark Twain
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 398

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Book Description


Mark Twain and the American West

Mark Twain and the American West PDF Author: Joseph L. Coulombe
Publisher: University of Missouri Press
ISBN: 0826263186
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 196

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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.

Mark Twain

Mark Twain PDF Author: Clinton Cox
Publisher: Turtleback Books
ISBN: 9780613189279
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Riverboat pilot, newspaper reporter, adventurer, satirist, and writer, Mark Twain was and is a towering figure in American literature. This definitive biography offers a fresh viewpoint on his colorful and controversial life, and includes archival photographs and extensive quotes from Twain's books.

Mark Twain and the South

Mark Twain and the South PDF Author: Arthur G. Pettit
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
ISBN: 9780813191409
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
The South was many things to Mark Twain: boyhood home, testing ground for manhood, and the principal source of creative inspiration. Although he left the South while a young man, seldom to return, it remained for him always a haunting presence, alternately loved and loathed. Mark Twain and the South was the first book on this major yet largely ignored aspect of the private life of Samuel Clemens and one of the major themes in his writing from 1863 until his death. Arthur G. Pettit clearly demonstrates that Mark Twain's feelings on race and region moved in an intelligible direction from the white Southern point of view he was exposed to in his youth to self-censorship, disillusionment, and, ultimately, a deeply pessimistic and sardonic outlook in which the dream of racial brotherhood was forever dead. Approaching his subject as a historian with a deep appreciation for literature, he bases his study on a wide variety of Mark Twain's published and unpublished works, including his notebooks, scrapbooks, and letters. An interesting feature of this illuminating work is an examination of Clemens's relations with the only two black men he knew well in his adult years.

Mark Twain and Philosophy

Mark Twain and Philosophy PDF Author: Alan Goldman
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1442261722
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 263

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Book Description
Mark Twain, the “Father of American Literature,” and renowned humorist, satirist, and commentator on humanity and American life, is best known for his classic, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Twain’s body of work, however, is expansive; from Adventures of Tom Sawyer and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court to the travelogue The Innocents Abroad and essays on human nature, religion, science, and literature, no aspect of life is left untouched by Twain. His portrayal of American life, ripe with the contradictions of America’s ideals and its actual practices, as well as his characters, at once fantastical and completely human, provide a window onto humanity and social life. As the third book in the Great Authors and Philosophy series, Mark Twain and Philosophy reveals deeper issues raised by Twain’s work and speaks to his continued relevance as a social commentator interrogating issues fundamental to our lives. From slavery, freedom, and human rights, to science, parapsychology, and religion, this book exposes how Twain’s body of work touches every corner of human experience.

Who Is Mark Twain?

Who Is Mark Twain? PDF Author: Mark Twain
Publisher: Harper Perennial
ISBN: 9780061735011
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
"You had better shove this in the stove," Mark Twain said at the top of an 1865 letter to his brother, "for I don't want any absurd ‘literary remains' and ‘unpublished letters of Mark Twain' published after I am planted." He was joking, of course. But when Mark Twain died in 1910, he left behind the largest collection of personal papers created by any nineteenth-century American author. Who Is Mark Twain? presents twenty-six wickedly funny, disarmingly relevant pieces by the American master—a man who was well ahead of his time.