Download or read book Mark Twain written by James Melville Cox and published by University of Missouri Press. This book was released on 2002 with total page 374 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Mark Twain: The Fate of Humor, James M. Cox pursues the development of Mark Twain's humor through all the forms it took from "The Jumping Frog" to The Mysterious Stranger. Instead of seeking the seriousness behind the humor, Cox concentrates upon the humor itself as the transfiguring power that converted all the "serious" issues and emotions of Mark Twain's life and time into narratives designed to evoke helpless laughter. In those sudden moments of pleasurable helplessness, we glimpse the great heart of a writer who imagined freedom in the slave society of his youth and discovered slavery in the free country of his old age. For this edition of Mark Twain: The Fate of Humor, the author has written a new introduction showing how and why Mark Twain remains a central figure in American life; he has also appended an essay disclosing why Adventures of Huckleberry Finn will always be a hard book to take.
Download or read book Mark Twain written by Harold H. Kolb and published by University Press of America. This book was released on 2014-10-29 with total page 518 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Mark Twain American Humorist written by Tracy Wuster and published by University of Missouri Press. This book was released on 2017-12-01 with total page 502 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mark Twain, American Humorist examines the ways that Mark Twain’s reputation developed at home and abroad in the period between 1865 and 1882, years in which he went from a regional humorist to national and international fame. In the late 1860s, Mark Twain became the exemplar of a school of humor that was thought to be uniquely American. As he moved into more respectable venues in the 1870s, especially through the promotion of William Dean Howells in the Atlantic Monthly, Mark Twain muddied the hierarchical distinctions between class-appropriate leisure and burgeoning forms of mass entertainment, between uplifting humor and debased laughter, and between the literature of high culture and the passing whim of the merely popular.
Download or read book Mark Twain Humour on the Run written by Stuart Hutchinson and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2021-11-15 with total page 139 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book The Complete Short Stories of Mark Twain written by Mark Twain and published by Bantam Classics. This book was released on 2005-09-27 with total page 850 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For deft plotting, riotous inventiveness, unforgettable characters, and language that brilliantly captures the lively rhythms of American speech, no American writer comes close to Mark Twain. This sparkling anthology covers the entire span of Twain’s inimitable yarn-spinning, from his early broad comedy to the biting satire of his later years. Every one of his sixty stories is here: ranging from the frontier humor of “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County,” to the bitter vision of humankind in “The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg,” to the delightful hilarity of “Is He Living or Is He Dead?” Surging with Twain’s ebullient wit and penetrating insight into the follies of human nature, this volume is a vibrant summation of the career of–in the words of H. L. Mencken–“the father of our national literature.”
Download or read book The Complete Humorous Sketches And Tales Of Mark Twain written by Mark Twain and published by Da Capo Press. This book was released on 1996-03-22 with total page 722 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first and most complete collection of all 136 humorous sketches and tales that Samuel Clemens (1835–1910), a.k.a. Mark Twain, started writing as a young reporter for various newspapers and magazines and later saw fit to issue in book form. Many pieces appeared in rare, first printings, only to be dropped in subsequent editions; for this reason, readers will encounter a number of yarns and tall tales unavailable elsewhere, even in the collected works. More unvarnished than his short stories or novels, and more willing to indulge in fun for its own sake, these sketches comprise a substantial share of his literary apprenticeship and legacy. As brilliant, representative nuggets of Twain's humor in its purest form, they carry the imprint of Twain's wit, imagination, and humanism, his fresh and always idiomatic prose. From 1862's "Curing a Cold" to 1904's "Italian Without a Master," this collection allows readers to share Twain's vision of life as a strange and comic affair. No one interested in American humor (or in need of a good laugh) can long remain indifferent to this uproarious book.
Download or read book Mark Twain s Autobiography written by Mark Twain and published by . This book was released on 1924 with total page 398 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Twain s Brand written by Judith Yaross Lee and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2013-02-26 with total page 347 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Samuel L. Clemens lost the 1882 lawsuit declaring his exclusive right to use “Mark Twain” as a commercial trademark, but he succeeded in the marketplace, where synergy among his comic journalism, live performances, authorship, and entrepreneurship made “Mark Twain” the premier national and international brand of American humor in his day. And so it remains in ours, because Mark Twain's humor not only expressed views of self and society well ahead of its time, but also anticipated ways in which humor and culture coalesce in today's postindustrial information economy—the global trade in media, performances, and other forms of intellectual property that began after the Civil War. In Twain's Brand: Humor in Contemporary American Culture, Judith Yaross Lee traces four hallmarks of Twain's humor that are especially significant today. Mark Twain's invention of a stage persona, comically conflated with his biographical self, lives on in contemporary performances by Garrison Keillor, Margaret Cho, Jerry Seinfeld, and Jon Stewart. The postcolonial critique of Britain that underlies America's nationalist tall tale tradition not only self-destructs in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court but also drives the critique of American Exceptionalism in Philip Roth's literary satires. The semi-literate writing that gives Adventures of Huckleberry Finn its “vernacular vision”—wrapping cultural critique in ostensibly innocent transgressions and misunderstandings—has a counterpart in the apparently untutored drawing style and social critique seen in The Simpsons, Lynda Barry's comics, and The Boondocks. And the humor business of recent decades depends on the same brand-name promotion, cross-media synergy, and copyright practices that Clemens pioneered and fought for a century ago. Twain's Brand highlights the modern relationship among humor, commerce, and culture that were first exploited by Mark Twain.
Download or read book No 44 The Mysterious Stranger written by Mark Twain and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2011-02-05 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Originally published: Berkeley, Calif; London: University of California Press, 1969.
Download or read book The Wit and Wisdom of Mark Twain written by Mark Twain and published by Union Square & Co.. This book was released on 2012-12-30 with total page 115 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This sparkling anthology of Mark Twains most trenchant remarks has been culled from his books, speeches, letters and conversations recorded by contemporaries. The sayings are as fresh today as when he first wrote them and represent Twain at his wittiest and best. A sparkling anthology culled from Mark Twains books, speeches, letters and conversations. As humorous and relevant today as they were in his time.
Download or read book Mark Twain s Book of Animals written by Mark Twain and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2011-07 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "For those unaware—as I was until I read this book—that Mark Twain was one of America's early animal advocates, Shelley Fisher Fishkin's collection of his writings on animals will come as a revelation. Many of these pieces are as fresh and lively as when they were first written, and it's wonderful to have them gathered in one place." —Peter Singer, author of Animal Liberation and The Life You Can Save “A truly exhilarating work. Mark Twain's animal-friendly views would not be out of place today, and indeed, in certain respects, Twain is still ahead of us: claiming, correctly, that there are certain degraded practices that only humans inflict on one another and upon other animals. Fishkin has done a splendid job: I cannot remember reading something so consistently excellent."—Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, author of When Elephants Weep and The Face on Your Plate "Shelley Fisher Fishkin has given us the lifelong arc of the great man's antic, hilarious, and subtly profound explorations of the animal world, and she's guided us through it with her own trademark wit and acumen. Dogged if she hasn't." —Ron Powers, author of Dangerous Water: A Biography of the Boy Who Became Mark Twain and Mark Twain: A Life
Download or read book Mark Twain Laughing written by Paul M. Zall and published by Univ. of Tennessee Press. This book was released on 1985 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Compares humorous stories Twain told publicly and privately with those wrongly attributed to him, and discusses his development as a speaker.
Download or read book A Tramp Abroad written by Mark Twain and published by . This book was released on 1880 with total page 422 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Is He Dead written by Mark Twain and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2003-10-17 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A group of impoverished artists living in France stage the death of a friend to increase the value of his paintings and then must engage in cross-dressing, deception, and romantic intrigue in order to make their plot succeed.
Download or read book On Mark Twain written by Louis J. Budd and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 1987 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume in The Best from American Literature series presents articles and profiles the evolution of literary opinion and the shifts of critical emphasis. Beginning with an analysis of science in the thought of Mark Twain, the volume examines his indebtedness to literary comedians, such as George Horatio Derby, better known as John Phoenix; his contributions to the traditions of Southwestern humor; and how he employed images of endangered families. Other topics include: Twain as translator from the German; the composition and structure of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; the style of Huckleberry Finn; his first and only novel about a young girl, Joan of Arc; the four roles into which he cast Satan; the probable meaning of A Connecticut Yankee; and a thematic analysis of Pudd'nhead Wilson. ISBN 0-8223-0759-6: $33.50.
Download or read book Mark Twain on the Damned Human Race written by Mark Twain and published by . This book was released on 1962 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A collection of essays written by Samuel Clements (as Mark Twain.).
Download or read book Library of Wit and Humor written by Melville De Lancey Landon and published by . This book was released on 1901 with total page 430 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
