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Books > Language & Literature > Literature: history & criticism > Literary studies > 19th century
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The Man Who Was Mark Twain - Images and Ideologies (Hardcover, New)
Loot Price: R1,906
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The Man Who Was Mark Twain - Images and Ideologies (Hardcover, New)
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"Americans have cherished and magnified versions of an idealized
Mark Twain. We admire and are amused by the celebrity, who sold his
pseudonym and his carefully composed face to advertise pipe
tobacco, cigarettes, whiskey, and postcards. The extent to which
the received images are authentic or inauthentic is, however, in
doubt. Common images must be modified when we examine the thoughts
and emotions important to the mind and heart of Samuel L. Clemens,
the private man."-from the Introduction No writer has been more
frequently identified with America than Mark Twain, an emblematic
figure often supposed to represent the essential qualities that
make America most admirably American. In a fresh appraisal,
supported by evidence from both the life and the writings, Guy
Cardwell convincingly revises our images of this cultural icon. He
portrays an exceptionally complex man who experienced debilitating
tensions and neuroses. Caldwell finds that even before the comedian
from the West met and married Olivia Langdon, the heiress from
Elmira, New York, he was ambitious to join and conquer the world of
Eastern affluence and gentility. Yet Clemens's jokes (in his
private notebooks) aggressing against women and blacks suggest that
his acculturation to gentility was never complete. This book throws
new light on Clemens's relations with his wife and her family and
on his attitudes toward business, money, art, sex, and the little
girls whose company he sought compulsively during his later years.
It argues persuasively that in the end Twain was hardly the robust
and genial representative of America's mythic frontier past.
Alienated from society and from his own writings, he was much more
the prototype of the overstrung, exploitatively individualistic
modern American.
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