The Mercurial Mark Twain(s)
The Mercurial Mark Twain(s)

Author: James L. Machor

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2023-03-15

Total Pages: 329

ISBN-13: 1000814203

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Who was Mark Twain? Was he the genial author of two beloved boys books, the white-haired and white-suited avuncular humorist, the realistic novelist, the exposer of shams, the author repressed by bourgeois values, or the social satirist whose later writings embody an increasingly dark view? In light of those and other conceptions, the question we need to ask is not who he was but how did we get so many Mark Twains? The Mercurial Mark Twains(s): Reception History and Iconic Authorship provides answers to that question by examining the way Twain, his texts, and his image have been constructed by his audiences. Drawing on archival records of responses from common readers, reviewer reactions, analyses by Twain scholars and critics, and film and television adaptations, this study provides the first wide-ranging, fine-grained historical analysis of Twain’s reception in both the public and private spheres, from the 1860s until the end of the twentieth century.

Mark Twain
Mark Twain

Author: Ron Powers

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2005-09-20

Total Pages: 592

ISBN-13: 074327475X

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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.

Mark Twain and the Novel
Mark Twain and the Novel

Author: Lawrence Howe

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 1998-10-13

Total Pages: 286

ISBN-13: 9780521561686

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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.

The Routledge Encyclopedia of Mark Twain
The Routledge Encyclopedia of Mark Twain

Author: J. R. LeMaster

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2011

Total Pages: 882

ISBN-13: 0415890586

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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

Author: Peter Messent

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2015-06-15

Total Pages: 597

ISBN-13: 1119117917

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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 and The Colonel
Mark Twain and The Colonel

Author: Philip McFarland

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2014-01-16

Total Pages: 517

ISBN-13: 1442212276

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Presents a narrative history of the United States from 1890 to 1910, exploring such major themes as nationalism, racism, industrialization, and imperialism as reflected in the actions and writings of the era's two most famous figures.

Critical Companion to Mark Twain
Critical Companion to Mark Twain

Author: R. Kent Rasmussen

Publisher: Infobase Publishing

Published: 2014-05-14

Total Pages: 1159

ISBN-13: 1438108524

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Praise for the previous edition:RASD/ALA "Outstanding Reference Source, 1996""'Essential' is the word for it!

Traveling in Mark Twain
Traveling in Mark Twain

Author: Richard Bridgman

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2024-06-28

Total Pages: 169

ISBN-13: 0520378776

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Suffering from wanderlust like many of his countrymen, Mark Twain had the good fortune to be paid to offer his observations in a series of travel letters and books. Curious and indefatigable, he used his incomparable skills to produce the vivid descriptions and humorous commentaries that made his books immensely popular. At the same time, travel writing afforded him the opportunity to engage in more personal explorations. The looseness of the travel narrative enabled Twain to put down virtually whatever came to mind, with little concern about connections. At a time when established values were faltering, this tolerance suited him. His travel books are strings of incidents, anecdotes, descriptions, and the occasional odd detail, all arranged along a geographical line. At any given moment, Twain's anarchistic independence was free to assert itself. The travel books are more than entertaining compilations. They represent serious, if offhand, explorations of Mark Twain's outer and inner worlds and help define him as part of the whole van of modernists moving into the twentieth century. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1987.

Mark Twain
Mark Twain

Author: Harold H. Kolb

Publisher: University Press of America

Published: 2014-10-29

Total Pages: 518

ISBN-13: 0761864210

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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.