Mark Twain and Nineteenth Century American Literature

Mark Twain and Nineteenth Century American Literature PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN: 9788185848129
Category : American fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 134

Book Description
Papers presented at the Seminar on "Mark Twain and Nineteenth Century American Fiction", in November 1991, organized by American Studies Research Centre.

In the Company of Books

In the Company of Books PDF Author: Sarah Wadsworth
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
ISBN: 9781558495418
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 302

Book Description
Tracing the segmentation of the literary marketplace in 19th century America, this book analyses the implications of the subdivided literary field for readers, writers, and literature itself.

A Companion to Mark Twain

A Companion to Mark Twain PDF Author: Peter Messent
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1405152192
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 592

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

The Cambridge Introduction to Mark Twain

The Cambridge Introduction to Mark Twain PDF Author: Peter Messent
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 113946227X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 120

Book Description
Mark Twain is a central figure in nineteenth-century American literature, and his novels are among the best-known and most often studied texts in the field. This clear and incisive Introduction provides a biography of the author and situates his works in the historical and cultural context of his times. Peter Messent gives accessible but penetrating readings of the best-known writings including Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. He pays particular attention to the way Twain's humour works and how it underpins his prose style. The final chapter provides up-to-date analysis of the recent critical reception of Twain's writing, and summarises the contentious and important debates about his literary and cultural position. The guide to further reading will help those who wish to extend their research and critical work on the author. This book will be of outstanding value to anyone coming to Twain for the first time.

Mark Twain and the Novel

Mark Twain and the Novel PDF Author: Lawrence Howe
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521561686
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 286

Book Description
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.

Public Sentiments

Public Sentiments PDF Author: Glenn Hendler
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 0807860220
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 288

Book Description
In this book, Glenn Hendler explores what he calls the "logic of sympathy" in novels by Walt Whitman, Louisa May Alcott, T. S. Arthur, Martin Delany, Horatio Alger, Fanny Fern, Nathaniel Parker Willis, Henry James, Mark Twain, and William Dean Howells. For these nineteenth-century writers, he argues, sympathetic identification was not strictly an individual, feminizing, and private feeling but the quintessentially public sentiment--a transformative emotion with the power to shape social institutions and political movements. Uniting current scholarship on gender in nineteenth-century American culture with historical and theoretical debates on the definition of the public sphere in the period, Hendler shows how novels taught diverse readers to "feel right," to experience their identities as male or female, black or white, middle or working class, through a sentimental, emotionally based structure of feeling. He links novels with such wide-ranging cultural and political discourses as the temperance movement, feminism, and black nationalism. Public Sentiments demonstrates that, whether published for commercial reasons or for higher moral and aesthetic purposes, the nineteenth-century American novel was conceived of as a public instrument designed to play in a sentimental key.

Mark Twain in Context

Mark Twain in Context PDF Author: John Bird
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108586988
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages :

Book Description
Mark Twain In Context provides the fullest introduction in one volume to the multifaceted life and times of one of the most celebrated American writers. It is a collection of short, lively contributions covering a wide range of topics on Twain's life and works. Twain lived during a time of great change, upheaval, progress, and challenge. He rose from obscurity to become what some have called 'the most recognizable person on the planet'. Beyond his contributions to literature, which were hugely important and influential, he was a businessman, an inventor, an advocate for social and political change, and ultimately a cultural icon. Placing his life and work in the context of his age reveals much about both Mark Twain and America in the last half of the nineteenth century, the twentieth century, and the first decades of the twenty-first century.

Mark Twain and the American West

Mark Twain and the American West PDF Author: Joseph L. Coulombe
Publisher: University of Missouri Press
ISBN: 082621956X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 198

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.

American Literature from the 1850s to 1945

American Literature from the 1850s to 1945 PDF Author: Adam Augustyn Assistant Manager and Assistant Editor, Literature
Publisher: The Rosen Publishing Group, Inc
ISBN: 1615301321
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 500

Book Description
Explores the works, writers, and movements that shaped the American literary canon from the end of the nineteenth century through the first half of the twentith.

Mark Twain, Travel Books, and Tourism

Mark Twain, Travel Books, and Tourism PDF Author: Jeffrey Alan Melton
Publisher: University of Alabama Press
ISBN: 0817311602
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 220

Book Description
Grounding this study in tourist theory, Melton explores how, in five travel books, Twain captures the birth and growth of a new creature who would go on to change the map of the world: the American tourist."--BOOK JACKET.