Mark Twain: The Fate of Humor

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University of Missouri Press, 2002 - 351 pages

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.

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Contents

DISCOVERY
3
PROFESSIONAL TRAVELER
34
THE MUSE OF SAMUEL CLEMENS
60
AUTOBIOGRAPHY
82
ROMANCE
105
IDYL
127
SOUTHWESTERN VERNACULAR
156
THE CAMPAIGN THAT FAILED
185
YANKEE SLANG
198
THE IRONIC STRANGER
222
THE MYSTERIOUS STRANGER
247
EXTRACT
285
APPENDIX A Hard Book to Take
311
INDEX
341
Copyright

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About the author (2002)

James M. Cox is Professor Emeritus of English at Dartmouth College. He is the author of Recovering Literature's Lost Ground: Essays in American Autobiography and the editor of the Penguin edition of Mark Twain's Life on the Mississippi. The Mark Twain and His Circle Series, edited by Tom Quirk and John Bird

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