Sam Clemens, of Hannibal, by Dixon Wecter

Sam Clemens, of Hannibal, by Dixon Wecter PDF Author: Dixon Wecter
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 335

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Sam Clemens, of Hannibal, by Dixon Wecter

Sam Clemens, of Hannibal, by Dixon Wecter PDF Author: Dixon Wecter
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 335

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Book Description


Was Huck Black?

Was Huck Black? PDF Author: Shelley Fisher Fishkin
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199728755
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 285

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Book Description
Published in 1884, Huck Finn has become one of the most widely taught novels in American curricula. But where did Huckleberry Finn come from, and what made it so distinctive? Shelley Fisher Fishkin suggests that in Huckleberry Finn, more than in any other work, Mark Twain let African-American voices, language, and rhetorical traditions play a major role in the creation of his art. In Was Huck Black?, Fishkin combines close readings of published and unpublished writing by Twain with intensive biographical and historical research and insights gleaned from linguistics, literary theory, and folklore to shed new light on the role African-American speech played in the genesis of Huckleberry Finn. Given that book's importance in American culture, her analysis illuminates, as well, how the voices of African-Americans have shaped our sense of what is distinctively "American" about American literature. Fishkin shows that Mark Twain was surrounded, throughout his life, by richly talented African-American speakers whose rhetorical gifts Twain admired candidly and profusely. A black child named Jimmy whom Twain called "the most artless, sociable and exhaustless talker I ever came across" helped Twain understand the potential of a vernacular narrator in the years before he began writing Huckleberry Finn, and served as a model for the voice with which Twain would transform American literature. A slave named Jerry whom Twain referred to as an "impudent and satirical and delightful young black man" taught Twain about "signifying"--satire in an African-American vein--when Twain was a teenager (later Twain would recall that he thought him "the greatest man in the United States" at the time). Other African-American voices left their mark on Twain's imagination as well--but their role in the creation of his art has never been recognized. Was Huck Black? adds a new dimension to current debates over multiculturalism and the canon. American literary historians have told a largely segregated story: white writers come from white literary ancestors, black writers from black ones. The truth is more complicated and more interesting. While African-American culture shaped Huckleberry Finn, that novel, in turn, helped shape African-American writing in the twentieth century. As Ralph Ellison commented in an interview with Fishkin, Twain "made it possible for many of us to find our own voices." Was Huck Black? dramatizes the crucial role of black voices in Twain's art, and takes the first steps beyond traditional cultural boundaries to unveil an American literary heritage that is infinitely richer and more complex than we had thought.

Sam Clemens of Hannibal

Sam Clemens of Hannibal PDF Author: Dixon Wecter
Publisher: Boston : Houghton Mifflin
ISBN:
Category : Authors, American
Languages : en
Pages : 360

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Book Description
This is the first definitive biography of the real Tom Sawyer--the fun-loving practical joker whose youth in a Mississippi River town typifies the Golden Age of American Boyhood. No major writer ever made more of his boyhood than did Samuel Clemens whose growing up has become a part of our common heritage.

Mark Twain's Hannibal, Huck, and Tom

Mark Twain's Hannibal, Huck, and Tom PDF Author: Mark Twain
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520375718
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 512

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Book Description
This volume provides authoritative texts of Twain’s unpublished writings, both fictional and factual, about the people and places of his home town, Hannibal, Missouri. A significant part of only one of them, "Jane Lampton Clemens," has been published; it was inserted unjustifiably in Twain's Authobiography . Written soon after the death of Clemens's mother on 27October 1890, it arranges and assesses a son's recollections of a vibrant personality important in shaping his life. At the start the author turns to the time when he, a six-year-old, knelt with his mother by the bed on which his dead brother lay—a harassing experience that understandably seared the boy's memory. The sketch moves on to a host of details about antebellum Hannibal, its society and its attitudes toward slavery, and to vivid memories about the child, his mother, and his father in the 1840's and 1850's. The movement from a single remembered episode to a series of loosely associated recollections was a typical performance in Clemens's "autobiography" and his fiction.

Routledge Revivals: Mark Twain as a Literary Comedian (1979)

Routledge Revivals: Mark Twain as a Literary Comedian (1979) PDF Author: David E. E. Sloane
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351183443
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 201

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Book Description
Originally published in 1979, Mark Twain as a Literary Comedian looks at how Mark Twain addressed social issues through humour. The Southwest provided the subject for much of Twain’s writing, but the roots of his style lay principally in north-eastern humour. In the mid-1800s the northern United States underwent social changes that reflected in the writing of the literary humourists like Twain. Sloane argues that he used humour to describe conditions in the emerging middle-class urban experience and express his American vision and that Twain’s views on the human, social, and political conditions, presented through his fictional characters, elevated the use of literary humour in the American novel.

Mark Twain: Humour on the Run

Mark Twain: Humour on the Run PDF Author: Stuart Hutchinson
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004490639
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 139

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Book Description
This book explores Twain's major writings as they address the New World and the Old, race, slavery, imperialism, the possibility of American literary form and the limits of humour. Twain's humour is an expression of the pleasure and fun of life, but it is also a response to ultimate contradictions and losses. It is particularly American in that it rarely points to harmonies that might actually be enjoyed beyond itself. It is the humour of someone always on the move if not on the run. The absence of any destination in Twain, other than the ultimate one of death, is why his work is so formally unsettled. There is no point of clarification where author, narrator and readers can be expected to arrive together. Texts treated in this book include The Innocents Abroad, Roughing It, Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, Life on the Mississippi, The Gilded Age, A Connecticut Yankee, Pudd'nhead Wilson, Following the Equator, The Mysterious Stranger, and several short pieces.

Mark Twain's Humor

Mark Twain's Humor PDF Author: David E. E. Sloane
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351403168
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 663

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Book Description
Originally published in 1993. The purpose of this volume is to lay out documents which give an estimate of Mark Twain as a humourist in both historical scope and in the analysis of modern scholars. The emphasis in this collection is on how Twain developed from a contemporary humourist among many others of his generation into a major comic writer and American spokesman and, in several more recent essays by younger Twain scholars, the outcomes of that development late in his career. The essays determine how the humor takes on meaning and importance and how the humor works in a number of ways in the literary canon and even in the persona of Mark Twain.

A Historical Guide to Mark Twain

A Historical Guide to Mark Twain PDF 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.

Mark Twain's Notebooks & Journals, Volume II (1877-1883)

Mark Twain's Notebooks & Journals, Volume II (1877-1883) PDF Author: Mark Twain
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520025423
Category : Authors, American
Languages : en
Pages : 718

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Mark Twain

Mark Twain PDF Author: Ron Powers
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 074327475X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 592

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Book Description
Ron Powers’s tour de force has been widely acclaimed as the best life and times, filled with Mark Twain’s voice, and as a great American story. Samuel Clemens, the man known as Mark Twain, invented the American voice and became one of our greatest celebrities. His life mirrored his country's, as he grew from a Mississippi River boyhood in the days of the frontier, to a Wild-West journalist during the Gold Rush, to become the king of the eastern establishment and a global celebrity as America became an international power. Along the way, Mark Twain keenly observed the characters and voices that filled the growing country, and left us our first authentically American literature. Ron Powers's magnificent biography offers the definitive life of the founding father of our culture.