Download or read book The Introspective Art of Mark Twain written by Douglas Anderson and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2017-04-20 with total page 301 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A new reading of the major themes and concerns of Mark Twain's life and work, tracing the development of his imagination from his earliest works in 1865 to his writings in the early twentieth century"--

Download or read book The Mark Twain Annual written by and published by . This book was released on 2006 with total page 476 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Mark Twain s America Then and Now written by Laura DeMarco and published by Rizzoli Publications. This book was released on 2019-10-29 with total page 146 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A unique biography of America's greatest writer and the places across the States he wrote about told through the format of "Then and Now" photos. This fascinating book documents Mark Twain's life story from Hannibal, Missouri, through to his death in Redding Connecticut in 1910. Along with a biographical sketch of his career are the descriptions Twain wrote of the great American cities and their buildings--photos of these places from the 19th and 20th centuries are matched with a modern-day viewpoint, so that readers can see how many of the sights admired (or pilloried) by Twain are with us today. Few would dispute that Mark Twain was a literary genius, a writer unique in his ability to capture the idioms of country speech, yet also write novels and travel journals that appealed to the powerful East Coast literary set. His career path took him all over the country, and all these locations are featured in a book that applies Twain's wry humor and trenchant observation to images from his America.

Download or read book The Tragedy of Pudd nhead Wilson written by Mark Twain and published by . This book was released on 1894 with total page 438 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Mark Twain s Literary Resources written by Alan Gribben and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2024-10-15 with total page 1124 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dr. Alan Gribben, a foremost Twain scholar, made waves in 1980 with the publication of Mark Twain's Library, a study that exposed for the first time the breadth of Twain's reading and influences. Prior to Gribben's work, much of Twain's reading history was assumed lost, but through dogged searching Gribben was able to source much of Twain's library. Mark Twain's Literary Resources is a much-expanded examination of Twain's library and readings. Volume I included Gribben's reflections on the work involved in cataloging Twain's reading and analysis of Twain's influences and opinions. This volume, long awaited, is an in-depth and comprehensive accounting of Twain's literary history. Each work read or owned by Twain is listed, along with information pertaining to editions, locations, and more. Gribben also includes scholarly annotations that explain the significance of many works, making this volume of Mark Twain's Literary Resources one of the most important additions to our understanding of America's greatest author.

Download or read book Mark Twain Speaking written by Mark Twain and published by University of Iowa Press. This book was released on 2006-09 with total page 721 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Originally published in 1976 and reissued in 2006 after many years out of print, Mark Twain Speaking assembles Twain's lectures, after-dinner speeches, and interviews from 1864 to 1909. Explanatory notes describe occasions, identify personalities, and discuss techniques of Twain's oral craftsmanship. A chronology listing date, place, and title of speech or type of engagement completes the collection.

Download or read book Gears and God written by Nathaniel Williams and published by University of Alabama Press. This book was released on 2018-07-31 with total page 221 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A revealing study of the connections between nineteenth-century technological fiction and American religious faith. In Gears and God: Technocratic Fiction, Faith, and Empire in Mark Twain’s America, Nathaniel Williams analyzes the genre of technology-themed exploration novels—dime novel adventure stories featuring steam-powered and electrified robots, airships, and submersibles. This genre proliferated during the same cultural moment when evolutionary science was dismantling Americans’ prevailing, biblically based understanding of human history. While their heyday occurred in the late 1800s, technocratic adventure novels like Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court inspired later fiction about science and technology. Similar to the science fiction plotlines of writers like Jules Verne and H. Rider Haggard, and anticipating the adventures of Tom Swift some decades later, these novels feature Americans using technology to visit and seize control of remote locales, a trait that has led many scholars to view them primarily as protoimperialist narratives. Their legacy, however, is more complicated. As they grew in popularity, such works became as concerned with the preservation of a fraught Anglo-Protestant American identity as they were with spreading that identity across the globe. Many of these novels frequently assert the Bible’s authority as a historical source. Collectively, such stories popularized the notion that technology and travel might essentially “prove” the Bible’s veracity—a message that continues to be deployed in contemporary debates over intelligent design, the teaching of evolution in public schools, and in reality TV shows that seek historical evidence for biblical events. Williams argues that these fictions performed significant cultural work, and he consolidates evidence from the novels themselves, as well as news articles, sermons, and other sources of the era, outlining and mapping the development of technocratic fiction.

Download or read book Mark Twain France written by Paula Harrington and published by University of Missouri Press. This book was released on 2017-07-31 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Blending cultural history, biography, and literary criticism, this book explores how one of America's greatest icons used the French to help build a new sense of what it is to be “American” in the second half of the nineteenth century. While critics have generally dismissed Mark Twain’s relationship with France as hostile, Harrington and Jenn see Twain’s use of the French as a foil to help construct his identity as “the representative American.” Examining new materials that detail his Montmatre study, the carte de visite album, and a chronology of his visits to France, the book offers close readings of writings that have been largely ignored, such as The Innocents Adrift manuscript and the unpublished chapters of A Tramp Abroad, combining literary analysis, socio-historical context and biographical research.

Download or read book Mark Twain at the Gallows written by Jarrod D. Roark and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2019-10-08 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is a literary exploration of Mark Twain's writings on crime in the American West and its intersection with morality, gender and justice. Writing from his office at the Enterprise newspaper in the Nevada Territory, Twain employed a distinct style of crime writing--one that sensationalized facts and included Twain's personal philosophies and observations. Covering Twain's journalism, fictional works and his own personal letters, this book contextualizes the writer's coverage of crime through his anxieties about westward expansion and the promise of a utopian West. Twain's observations on the West often reflected common perceptions of the day, positioning him as a "voice of the people" on issues like crime, punishment and gender.

Download or read book Dear Mark Twain written by Mark Twain and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2013-04-21 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Collects two hundred letters from readers of Mark Twain to the author himself, offering a glimpse into the lives and sensibilites of nineteenth-century children, preachers, con artists, inmates, and other fans of the author's work.

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 A New Orleans Author in Mark Twain s Court written by Miki Pfeffer and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2019-11-11 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shortly after Grace King wrote her first stories in post-Reconstruction New Orleans, she entered a world of famous figures and literary giants greater than she could ever have imagined. Notable writers and publishers of the Northeast bolstered her career, and she began a decades-long friendship with Mark Twain and his family that was as unlikely as it was remarkable. Beginning in 1887, King paid long visits to the homes of friends and associates in New England and benefited from their extended circles. She interacted with her mentor, Charles Dudley Warner; writers Harriet Beecher Stowe and William Dean Howells; painter Frederic E. Church; suffragist Isabella Beecher Hooker; Chaucer scholar Thomas Lounsbury; impresario Augustin Daly; actor Will Gillette;cleric Joseph Twichell; and other stars of the era. As compelling as a novel, this audacious story of King’s northern ties unfolds in eloquent letters. They hint at the fictional themes that would end up in her own art; they trace her development from literary novice to sophisticated businesswoman who leverages her own independence and success. Through excerpts from scores of new transcriptions, as well as contextualizing narrative and annotations, Miki Pfeffer weaves a cultural tapestry that includes King’s volatile southern family as it struggles to reclaim antebellum status and a Gilded Age northern community that ignores inevitable change. King’s correspondence with the Clemens family reveals incomparable affection. As a regular guest in their household, she quickly distinguished “Mark,” the rowdy public persona, from “Mr. Clemens,” the loving husband of Livy and father of Susy, Clara, and Jean, all of whom King came to know intimately. Their unguarded, casual revelations of heartbreaks and joys tell something more than the usual Twain lore, and they bring King into sharper focus. All of their existing letters are gathered here, many published for the first time. A New Orleans Author in Mark Twain’s Court paints a fascinating picture of the northern literary personalities who caused King’s budding career to blossom.

Download or read book The Mark Twain Encyclopedia written by J. R. LeMaster and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 1993 with total page 952 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A reference guide to the great American author (1835-1910) for students and general readers. The approximately 740 entries, arranged alphabetically, are essentially a collection of articles, ranging significantly in length and covering a variety of topics pertaining to Twain's life, intellectual milieu, literary career, and achievements. Because so much of Twain's writing reflects Samuel Clemens's personal experience, particular attention is given to the interface between art and life, i.e., between imaginative reconstructions and their factual sources of inspiration. Each entry is accompanied by a selective bibliography to guide readers to sources of additional information. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Download or read book Mark Twain among the Indians and Other Indigenous Peoples written by Kerry Driscoll and published by University of California Press. This book was released on 2019-09-17 with total page 464 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mark Twain among the Indians and Other Indigenous Peoples is the first book-length study of the writer’s evolving views regarding the aboriginal inhabitants of North America and the Southern Hemisphere, and his deeply conflicted representations of them in fiction, newspaper sketches, and speeches. Using a wide range of archival materials—including previously unexamined marginalia in books from Clemens’s personal library—Driscoll charts the development of the writer’s ethnocentric attitudes about Indians and savagery in relation to the various geographic and social milieus of communities he inhabited at key periods in his life, from antebellum Hannibal, Missouri, and the Sierra Nevada mining camps of the 1860s to the progressive urban enclave of Hartford’s Nook Farm. The book also examines the impact of Clemens’s 1895–96 world lecture tour, when he traveled to Australia and New Zealand and learned firsthand about the dispossession and mistreatment of native peoples under British colonial rule. This groundbreaking work of cultural studies offers fresh readings of canonical texts such as The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, Roughing It, and Following the Equator, as well as a number of Twain’s shorter works.

Download or read book Heretical Fictions written by LAWRENCE I. BERKOVE and published by University of Iowa Press. This book was released on 2010-04-15 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Heretical Fictions is the first full-length study to assess the importance of Twain’s heretical Calvinism as the foundation of his major works, bringing to light important thematic ties that connect the author’s early work to his high period and from there to his late work. Berkove and Csicsila set forth the main elements of Twain’s “countertheological” interpretation of Calvinism and analyze in detail the way it shapes five of his major books—Roughing It, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, and No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger—as well as some of his major short stories. The result is a ground-breaking and unconventional portrait of a seminal figure in American letters.

Download or read book Refocusing Chaplin written by Lawrence Howe and published by Scarecrow Press. This book was released on 2013-10-03 with total page 251 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Widely recognized in his character of the Tramp, Charlie Chaplin transcended the role of actor to become screenwriter, director, composer, producer, and finally studio head. The subject of numerous biographical studies, Chaplin has been examined as both myth and man, but these treatments fail to adequately address the often-overlooked complexity of his filmmaking. Refocusing Chaplin: A Screen Icon through Critical Lenses features essays that examine the actor and director through various theoretical perspectives—including Marxism, feminism, gender studies, deconstruction, psychoanalytic criticism, new historicism, performance studies, and cultural criticism. Complementing this range of intellectual inquiry is the wide reach of films discussed, from The Circus (1928), The Gold Rush (1925), and City Lights (1931) to Modern Times (1936), The Great Dictator (1940), Monsieur Verdoux (1947), and Limelight (1952). Shorter films, such as “The Pawnshop” (1916), “The Rink” (1916), and “A Dog’s Life” (1918) are also examined. These essays analyze the tensions between the carefully constructed worlds of Chaplin’s films and their cultural contexts. The varied approaches and range of materials in this volume not only comprehensively assess the screen icon but also foster a conversation that exemplifies the best of intellectual exchange. Refocusing Chaplin provides a unique view into the work of one of cinema’s most important and influential artists.

Download or read book A Scrap of Curious History written by Mark Twain and published by Createspace Independent Publishing Platform. This book was released on 2018-04-24 with total page 24 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Scrap of Curious History is an essay published by Mark Twain as part of the 'What Is Man? and Other Essays' collection. It forms the sixth essay out of a total of fifteen within the original publication and deals with the fictional history of abolitionism in a Missouri town.