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Mark Twain's Humor: Critical Essays
David E.E. Sloane
Contents:
Introduction / David E.E. Sloane -- Part I. The early writings of Mark Twain : the growth of the comedian -- 'My voice is still for Setchell' : a background study of 'Jim Smiley and his jumping frog' / Edgar M. Branch -- Burlesque travel literature and Mark Twain's Roughing it / Franklin R. Rogers -- From the old Southwest / Pascal Covici, Jr. -- A curious Republican / Louis J. Budd -- Toward the novel / David E.E. Sloane -- Part II. The middle career of Mark Twain from Tom Sawyer to Pudd'nhead Wilson : the comedian as major author -- Novels of the week : The adventures of Tom Sawyer / Athenaeum -- On the structure of Tom Sawyer / Walter Blair -- Mark Twain / William Dean Howells -- Trowbridge and Clemens / Rufus A. Coleman -- Mustangs without method / Blackwood's magazine -- Mark Twain and the old time subscription book / George Ade -- Mark Twain on the lecture platform / Will M. Clemens -- Life reviews Huckleberry Finn / Durant Da Ponte -- Huckleberry Finn : the book we love to hate / Leslie A. Fiedler -- A sound heart and a deformed conscience / Henry Nash Smith -- A Connecticut Yankee anticipated : Max Adeler's Fortunate island / Edward F. Foster -- Yankee slang / James M. Cox -- I kind of love small game : Mark Twain's library of literary hogwash / Alan Gribben -- The American claimant : reclamation of a farce / Clyde Grimm -- Mark Twain -- an intimate memory / Henry Watterson -- The book hunter [review of Pudd'nhead Wilson] / The Idler -- In re 'Pudd'nhead Wilson' / Martha McCulloch Williams -- 'The tales he couldn't tell' : Mark Twain, race and culture at the century's end : a social context for Pudd'nhead Wilson / Shelley Fisher Fiskin -- Part III. The later career of Mark Twain : the comedian as a cultural representative -- Mark Twain : an inquiry / William Dean Howells -- The international fame of Mark Twain / Archibald Henderson -- An inspired critic / Edith Wyatt -- The anecdotal side of Mark Twain / Ladies' Home Journal -- 3-Mark Twain / A.C. Ward -- Review of Tom Sawyer abroad / The Academy -- 'Hadleyburg' : Mark Twain's dual attack on banal theology and banal literature / Susan K. Harris -- Is the Philippine policy of the administration just? / John Kendrick Bangs and Mark Twain -- Reconstructing the 'imagination mill' : the mystery of Mark Twain's late works / Susanne Weil -- Coming back to humor : the comic voice in Mark Twain's autobiography / Michael J. Kiskis -- 'The mysterious stranger' : absence of the female in Mark Twain biography / Laura E. Skandera-Trombley.
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Hook: A Memoir
Randall Horton
HOOK: A MEMOIR is a gripping story of transformation. Without excuse or indulgence, author and educator Randall Horton explores his downward spiral from unassuming Howard University undergraduate to homeless drug addict, international cocaine smuggler, and incarcerated felon—before showing us the redemptive role that writing and literature played in helping him reclaim his life. The multilayered narrative bridges past and present through both the vivid portrayal of Horton's singular experiences and his correspondence in letters with the anonymous Lxxxx, a Latina woman awaiting trial. HOOK explores race and social construction in America, the forgotten lives within the prison industrial complex, and the resilience of the human spirit.
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Pitch Dark Anarchy: Poems
Randall Horton
Pitch Dark Anarchy investigates the danger of one single narrative with multilayered poems that challenge concepts of beauty and image, race and identity, as well as the construction of skin color. Through African American memory and moments in literature, the poems seek to disrupt and dismantle foundations that create erasures and echoes of the unremembered. Pitch Dark Anarchy uses the slave revolt of the Amistad as a starting point, a metaphor for "opposition" and "against." These themes run through the very core for the book while drawing on inventive and playful language. The poems bring to life human experiences and conditions created by an "elite" society. In these poems, locations and landscapes are always shifting, proving that our shared experiences can be interchangeable. At the very core of Pitch Dark Anarchy is a seven-part poem based on the artist Margret Bowland’s Another Thorny Crown Series, which are paintings of an African American girl in white face.
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The Construction of Irish Identity in American Literature
Christopher Dowd
This book examines the development of literary constructions of Irish-American identity from the mid-nineteenth century arrival of the Famine generation through the Great Depression. It goes beyond an analysis of negative Irish stereotypes and shows how Irish characters became the site of intense cultural debate regarding American identity, with some writers imagining Irishness to be the antithesis of Americanness, but others suggesting Irishness to be a path to Americanization. This study emphasizes the importance of considering how a sense of Irishness was imagined by both Irish-American writers conscious of the process of self-definition as well as non-Irish writers responsive to shifting cultural concerns regarding ethnic others. It analyzes specific iconic Irish-American characters including Mark Twain’s Huck Finn and Margaret Mitchell’s Scarlett O’Hara, as well as lesser-known Irish monsters who lurked in the American imagination such as T.S. Eliot’s Sweeney and Frank Norris’ McTeague. As Dowd argues, in contemporary American society, Irishness has been largely absorbed into a homogeneous white culture, and as a result, it has become a largely invisible ethnicity to many modern literary critics. Too often, they simply do not see Irishness or do not think it relevant, and as a result, many Irish-American characters have been de-ethnicized in the critical literature of the past century. This volume reestablishes the importance of Irish ethnicity to many characters that have come to be misread as generically white and shows how Irishness is integral to their stories.
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Student Companion to Mark Twain
David E.E. Sloane
Introduces the life and work of Samuel Langhorne Clemens, the writer better known as Mark Twain, examines his influence on American literature, and analyzes his travel writing, his best-known novels, and his other works.
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New Directions in American Humor
David E.E. Sloane
Examining television, cartoons, sports, political reporting, film and literature, this anthology places American humour in social and historic context and identifies the directions and themes that will make up the field of American humour studies in the 21st century.
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Sister Carrie, Theodore Dreiser's Sociological Tragedy
David E.E. Sloane
Theodore Dreiser's Sister Carrie (1900) broke new literary ground in a number of ways. Its graphic documentary style, urban setting, and concern with economic and sociological issues set it apart from popular fiction of the period. In his characteristically detailed and awkwardly methodical style, Dreiser crafted characters and situations that dramatize the forces of economic necessity, social censure, and urban anonymity. Set in turn-of-the-century Chicago and New York, the novel explores the life of Carrie Meeber, a poor rural woman whose naivete and poverty make her an ideal target for the dangers of urban life. Dreiser depicts the dilemma created by Carrie's desire to succeed and find security in a morally and financially compromised society that lures her with its glitter. David E.E. Sloane's study proposes that Dreiser's sociological tragedy uses the details of the cityscape and the lives of its urban characters to build a drama in which none of the characters are able to achieve real happiness. Sloane demonstrates how Dreiser used themes already of concern to his readers but managed them in ways that challenged the moral and sexual assumptions of the day. Sloane's thesis is that the novel addresses economic inequality by showing that even in the poor and inarticulate like Carrie Meeber there are physical and spiritual drives that need expression but that are repressed by social mores. The study offers a detailed examination of how Dreiser's stylistic and structural choices are perfectly suited to his material, and shows how the novel forged the way for other socially conscious works in the twentieth-century.
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Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: American Comic Vision
David E.E. Sloane
Contents:
1. Historical Context 2. The Importance of the Work 3. Critical Reception
A Reading
4. Undermining Authority 5. Huck Acts, An Escape From Sivilization 6. The Raft and the River: Defining an Ethic 7. The Duke and the Dauphin: Authoritarian Fraud 8. The Wilks Episode: Huck and Mary Jane 9. Huck's Moral Reasoning as Heroism 10. The Last Fifth of the Novel as Echo: The Phelps Farm 11. Tying Up Loose Ends
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American Humor Magazines and Comic Periodicals
David E.E. Sloane
"This first annotated guide devoted entirely to American humor magazines and periodicals provides a comprehensive survey of a genre that has both enriched and reflected American mores, popular culture, and literature for over two hundred years. It offers analytical essays, bibliographies, and historical information on nearly three hundred of the most important individual publications, as well as extensive listings of rare periodicals about which very little is presently known."
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The Literary Humor of the Urban Northeast, 1830-1890
David E.E. Sloane
Contents:
Preface --
Introduction --
Jonathan's visit to the celestial empire / James K. Paulding --
Steam / William Cox --
Peter Brush; or, The great used up ; News-boy / Joseph C. Neal --
Stage competitors : a tale of the road / George P. Morris --
Female colleges / Thomas C. Haliburton --
Pumpkin freshet ; How to tell a story / Seba Smith & Elizabeth Oakes Smith (Mrs. Seba Smith) --
from Struggles and triumphs ; or, Forty years' recollections of P.T. Barnum / P.T. Barnum ; Barnum and the barber / Anon. ; Man that got humbugged / Anon. --
from Pluri-bus-tah ; from American civilization illustrated : a great slave auction / Mortimer N. Thomson (Q.K. Philander Doesticks, P.B.) --
from The new Yankee Doodle / E. Jane Gay (Truman Trumbull, A.M.) --
Bone ornaments ; Breitmann in battle ; Ballad ; Ballad apout de rowdies ; from Breitmann in politics ; Rise and fall of Gloryville ; Zion Jersey Boggs : a legend of Philadelphia ; Story of Mr. Scroper, architect / Charles G. Leland --
Barnum's first speech in Congress ; Petticoat government ; Cannibalism in the cars ; Mark Twain on his muscle / Samuel L. Clemens (Mark Twain) --
Inspired lobbyist / John W. DeForest --
Jenette Finster's story / Marietta Holley (Josiah Allen's wife) --
Further selections from various sources --
from A pickle for the knowing ones; or, Plain truth in a homespun dress / Timothy Dexter ; Speech of David Wood while standing in the pillory at Charlestown, N.H., May 27th, 1797, for forging a deed / Anon. ; Pickpocket training poem on credit / Anon. ; Muggy morning off Sandy Hook : a yarn spun by a Yankee tar / Anon. ; Soliloquy of a low thief ; Prince of Wales / Charles F. Browne (Artemus Ward) ; First locomotive / Anon. ; Picketing--an afecting war incident /Anon. ; Amerikan aristokrasy / Henry W. Shaw (Josh Billings) ; Essays on animated nature : Meleagris Gallopavo--the American turkey / Anon. ; Why she could not be his wife / Anon. --
Bibliographical essay. -
Mark Twain as a Literary Comedian
David E.E. Sloane
"The southwestern humorists have traditionally been identified as the major impulse behind Mark Twain's humor. However, the hallmark of his comedy lies in his egalitarian vision, projected not through the local color elements that characterize the humor of the old southwestern United States as much as through the jokes, ironic inversions, and burlesques of another school of American humor--the literary comedians of the 1850s and the Civil War era." --p. 1
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