Mark Twain and the Art of the Tall Tale

ISBN-13: 9780195078015 / Angielski / Twarda / 1993 / 224 str.

Henry B. Wonham

Opis

Mark Twain and the Art of the Tall Tale is a study of a peculiar American comic strategy and its role in Mark Twain's fiction. Focusing on the writer's experiments with narrative structure, Wonham describes how Twain manipulated conventional approaches to reading and writing by engaging his audience in a series of rhetorical games--the rules of which he adapted from the conventions of tall tale in American oral and written traditions. Wonham goes on to show how Twain's appropriation of the genre developed through the course of his career, from The Innocents Abroad to Tom Sawyer, Huck Finn, and Pudd'nhead Wilson. This eminently readable study will interest Twain enthusiasts and students of nineteenth-century American literature, as well as anyone interested in American humor and oral narrative traditions.

Recenzje

Wonham's investigation is fruitful ... since it shifts the focus from a folklorist perspective to the communicative process to the communicative process, examining the roots of the genre's idiosyncratic relationship between truth and lie, fact and fiction, reality and fantasy. The study profits from its specialized focus and, as good ones do, thus triggers a host of new questions. Like any good study, Wonham's book raises crucial questions and deserves particular credit for elaborating the complexity of tall-talking.