Pudd'nhead Wilson and Those Extraordinary Twins PDF Download

Author: Mark Twain
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Conjoined twins
Languages : en
Pages : 314

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Book Description
This is a story of a sober kind, picturing life in a little town of Missouri, half a century ago. The principal incidents relate to a slave of mixed blood and her almost pure white son, whom she substitutes for her master's baby. The slave by birth grows up in wealth and luxury, but turns out a peculiarly mean scoundrel, and perpetrating a crime, meets with due justice. The science of fingerprints is practically illustrated in detecting the fraud. The title character is the village atheist, whose maxims doubtless express much of the author's own disillusion.

Author: Mark Twain
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 438

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Book Description
When a mulatto slave woman switches her own infant with the look-alike son of a wealthy merchant, it takes Pudd'nhead Wilson, the town eccentric, to put things right again.

Author: Mark Twain
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 94

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Book Description
Pudd'nhead Wilson (1894) is a novel by American writer Mark Twain.Its central intrigue revolves around two boys--one, born into slavery,the other,white,born to be the master of the house.The two boys,who look similar,are switched at infancy.Each grows into the other's social role.Originally part of the Pudd'nhead Wilson book, Twain realised during the writing process that the twins were taking a backseat to characters such as Pudd'nhead Wilson,Roxy,and Tom Driscoll.As a result,he took them out and gave them their own short story. He explains all this in the Introduction to this book.

Author: Susan Gillman
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822381621
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 282

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Book Description
This collection seeks to place Pudd’nhead Wilson—a neglected, textually fragmented work of Mark Twain’s—in the context of contemporary critical approaches to literary studies. The editors’ introduction argues the virtues of using Pudd’nhead Wilson as a teaching text, a case study in many of the issues presently occupying literary criticism: issues of history and the uses of history, of canon formation, of textual problematics, and finally of race, class, and gender. In a variety of ways the essays build arguments out of, not in spite of, the anomalies, inconsistencies, and dead ends in the text itself. Such wrinkles and gaps, the authors find, are the symptoms of an inconclusive, even evasive, but culturally illuminating struggle to confront and resolve difficult questions bearing on race and sex. Such fresh, intellectually enriching perspectives on the novel arise directly from the broad-based interdisciplinary foundations provided by the participating scholars. Drawing on a wide variety of critical methodologies, the essays place the novel in ways that illuminate the world in which it was produced and that further promise to stimulate further study. Contributors. Michael Cowan, James M. Cox, Susan Gillman, Myra Jehlen, Wilson Carey McWilliams, George E. Marcus, Carolyn Porter, Forrest Robinson, Michael Rogin, John Carlos Rowe, John Schaar, Eric Sundquist

Author: Mary White Rowlandson
Publisher: BoD – Books on Demand
ISBN: 3387002807
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 86

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Book Description
Reproduction of the original. The publishing house Megali specialises in reproducing historical works in large print to make reading easier for people with impaired vision.

Author: Mark Twain
Publisher: Oxford Mark Twain
ISBN: 9780199733491
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 14176

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Book Description
Presents facsimile first editions of Twain's works that include all original illustrations. Each volume contains introductions by literary heavyweights including Toni Morrison, Kurt Vonnegut, Cynthia Ozick, Gore Vidal, George Plimpton, Bobbie Ann Mason, and Walter Mosley, among others.

Author: Mark Twain
Publisher: Open Road Media
ISBN: 1480453420
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 183

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Book Description
A Southern town scandalized by the murder of its most prominent citizen uncovers a mystery even more shocking in this ironic suspense story from a great American master Afraid for her infant son’s life, a slave switches the boy with her master’s child. A young New York lawyer fascinated by palmistry and fingerprint analysis moves below the Mason–Dixon line, makes a bad joke, and is immediately and forever branded a “pudd’nhead.” Two Italian noblemen pay a visit to Dawson’s Landing, Missouri, and become prime suspects in the murder of a local judge. From these disparate plot strands, Mark Twain fashions a humorous and entertaining tale with all the elements of the traditional murder mystery: a case of mistaken identity, a gruesome crime, a sinister villain, an eccentric detective, a climactic courtroom showdown, and an ingenious solution. But beneath this potboiler’s pomp and circumstance lurks a clear-eyed and savagely compelling indictment of slavery and its poisonous effects on American society. Twain’s last novel set in the antebellum South, Pudd’nhead Wilson offers his clearest and most provocative condemnation of racial prejudice. This ebook has been professionally proofread to ensure accuracy and readability on all devices.

Author: Arthur G. Pettit
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
ISBN: 0813148782
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 236

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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.

Author: Jessamyn West
Publisher: Mariner Books
ISBN: 9780156029094
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 228

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Book Description
Jess Birdwell, a Quaker with a fondness for fast horses, his wife Eliza, and their children struggle to deal with the turmoil, violence, and challenges of the Civil War in their own way. Reprint. 12,500 first printing.

Author: Mark Twain
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674967542
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 305

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Book Description
When a murder takes place in Dawson’s Landing, Missouri, the lives of twin Italian noblemen, the courageous slave Roxy, her 1/32nd “black” son who has been raised “white,” and a failing lawyer with an intense interest in the science of fingerprinting become tangled. The unsolved riddle at the heart of Pudd’nhead Wilson is less the identity of the murderer than it is the question of whether nature or nurture makes the man. In his introduction, Werner Sollors illuminates the complex web of uncertainty that is the switched-and-doubled-identity world of Mark Twain’s novel. This edition follows the text of the 1899 De Luxe edition and for the first time reprints all the E. W. Kemble illustrations that accompanied it. Since 1959 The John Harvard Library has been instrumental in publishing essential American writings in authoritative editions.