Mark Twain (Modern Novelists)

Provides an overview of Mark Twain's work and a close critical analysis of his major texts, including Huckleberry Finn, A Connecticut Yankee and Puddn'head Wilson . Re-examining Twain's travel-writing and fictions in light of recent cultural and literal theory, the author focuses on Twain's attitudes toward Europe and the American West, and discusses his representations of boyhood, race relations, capitalist expansion, and technology. Anxieties about changes in the social and industrial order in post Civil-War America and the status of the individual within it are also examined. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.