Author: Henry B. Wonham Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA ISBN: 0195078012 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 218
Book Description
Mark Twain and the Art of the Tall Tale explores a predominantly American comic strategy and its role in Mark Twain's fiction. Focusing on the writer's experiments with narrative structure, Wonham describes how Twain manipulated conventional approaches to reading and writing by engaging his audience in a series of rhetorical games - the rules of which he adapted from the conventions of the tall tale in American oral and written traditions. After surveying the rich history of yarn-spinning in America, Wonham traces Twain's appropriation of the genre through the course of his career, from The Innocents Abroad to Tom Sawyer, Huck Finn, and Pudd'nhead Wilson. He contends that as Twain turned from short sketches to extended travelogues and quasi-fiction, he found in the tall tale a means of dramatizing his disparate comic material. Later, as Twain worked consciously to purge his writing of its anecdotal quality, the oral genre remained central to his imagination - less as a source of comic material than as a paradigmatic encounter between competing points of view, an encounter that resonates throughout the author's major fiction. Offering an original interpretation of Twain's narrative and rhetorical techniques, this absorbing and readable study will interest Twain enthusiasts and students of nineteenth-century American literature, as well as anyone interested in American humor and oral narrative traditions.
Author: Henry B. Wonham Publisher: Oxford University Press ISBN: 0195360192 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 218
Book Description
Mark Twain and the Art of the Tall Tale is a study of a peculiar American comic strategy and its role in Mark Twain's fiction. Focusing on the writer's experiments with narrative structure, Wonham describes how Twain manipulated conventional approaches to reading and writing by engaging his audience in a series of rhetorical games--the rules of which he adapted from the conventions of tall tale in American oral and written traditions. Wonham goes on to show how Twain's appropriation of the genre developed through the course of his career, from The Innocents Abroad to Tom Sawyer, Huck Finn, and Pudd'nhead Wilson. This eminently readable study will interest Twain enthusiasts and students of nineteenth-century American literature, as well as anyone interested in American humor and oral narrative traditions.
Author: Peter Messent Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press ISBN: 9780812236224 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 290
Book Description
"A delightfully informed path through the complexities of composition, publishing history, and the textual discontinuities that characterize so many of Twain's stories."—Journal of American Studies
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.
Author: Henry B. Wonham
Author: Henry B. Wonham
Author: Henry Brunie Wonham
Author: Harold Bloom
Author: James Edward Caron
Author: Mark Twain
Author: Peter Messent
Author: R. Kent Rasmussen
Author: Mark Twain
Author: Jeffrey Alan Melton