Welcome to our book review site go-pdf.online!
You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
On Mark Twain
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.
Literary Wit
"Michelson argues that to achieve a modernized and less-reductive understanding of the comic mode, conventional ideas must be extended, refreshed, qualified, and ultimately left behind. Revisiting Bergson, Freud, Bakhtin, and other authorities, he develops a new description of literary wit, with an emphasis on brevity, eloquence, and surprise, and gives special attention to the power and provenance of the modern epigram
Sober, Strict, and Scriptural
Calvinism s influence and reputation have received ample scholarly attention. But how John Calvin himself his person, character, and deeds was remembered, commemorated, and memorialized, is a question few historians have addressed. Focussing on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, this volume aims to open up the subject with chapters on Calvin s monumentalization in statues and museums, his appearance in novels, children s books, and travel writing, his iconic function for Hungarian nationalists and Presbyterian missionaries to China, his reputation among Mormons and freethinkers, and his rivalry with Michael Servetus in French Protestant memory. The result is a fresh contribution to the field of religious memory studies and an invitation to further comparative research.Contributors include: R. Bryan Bademan, Patrick Cabanel, R. Scott Clark, Thomas J. Davis, Stephen S. Francis, Joe B. Fulton, Botond Gaál, Stefan Laube, Johan de Niet, Herman Paul, James Rigney, Michèle Sacquin, Jonathan Seitz, Robert Vosloo, Bart Wallet, and Valentine Zuber.
Playing It Straight
Outgrowth of the author's thesis (Yale University, 2007) under the title: The plague of jocularity: contesting humor in American art and culture, 1863-1893.
The Neuroscientific Turn
An interdisciplinary collection considering implications of the current 'neurorevolution'
The Novel of Purpose
In the nineteenth century, Great Britain and the United States shared a single literary marketplace that linked the reform movements, as well as the literatures, of the two nations. The writings of transatlantic reformers—antislavery, temperance, and suffrage activists—gave novelists a new sense of purpose and prompted them to invent new literary forms. The result was a distinctively Anglo-American realism, in which novelists, conceiving of themselves as reformers, sought to act upon their readers—and, through their readers, the world. Indeed, reform became so predominant that many novelists borrowed from reformist writings even though they were skeptical of reform itself. Among them a...
The Politics of Anxiety in Nineteenth-Century American Literature
For much of the nineteenth century, the nervous system was a medical mystery, inspiring scientific studies and exciting great public interest. Because of this widespread fascination, the nerves came to explain the means by which mind and body related to each other. By the 1830s, the nervous system helped Americans express the consequences on the body, and for society, of major historical changes. Literary writers, including Nathaniel Hawthorne and Harriet Beecher Stowe, used the nerves as a metaphor to re-imagine the role of the self amidst political, social and religious tumults, including debates about slavery and the revivals of the Second Great Awakening. Representing the 'romance' of the nervous system and its cultural impact thoughtfully and, at times, critically, the fictional experiments of this century helped construct and explore a neurological vision of the body and mind. Murison explains the impact of neurological medicine on nineteenth-century literature and culture.
Centenary Reflections on Mark Twain's No. 44, the Mysterious Stranger
In this first book on No. 44 in thirty years, thirteen especially commissioned essays by some of today's most accomplished Twain scholars cover an array of topics, from domesticity and transnationalism to race and religion, and reflect a variety of scholarly and theoretical approaches to the work. This far-reaching collection considers the status of No. 44 within Twain's oeuvre as they offer cogent insights into such broad topics as cross-culturalism, pain and redemption, philosophical paradox, and comparative studies of the "Mysterious Stranger" manuscripts. All of these essays attest to the importance of this late work in Twain's canon, whether considering how Twain's efforts at truth-tell...
The Critical Reception of Edith Wharton
Ironically, now that she is becoming recognized as a Modernist by some, and as perhaps the greatest American writer of her generation, the criticism often obfuscates more than it reveals. The reasons reside in critics' loyalties to various theoretical approaches, the objectivity of which are often compromised by political hopes. This volume not only traces and analyzes the development of Whartonian literary criticism in its historical and political contexts, but also allows Edith Wharton, herself a literary critic, to respond to various concepts through the author's deductions and extrapolations from Wharton's own words.
Mark Twain and the Spiritual Crisis of His Age
Mark Twain is often pictured as a severe critic of religious piety, shaking his fist at God and mocking the devout. This book highlights Twain's attractions to and engagements with the variety of religious phenomena of America in his lifetime. It offers a more complicated understanding of Twain and his literary output.
