Mark Twain is a central figure in nineteenth-century American literature, and his novels are among the best-known and most often studied texts in the field. This clear and incisive Introduction provides a biography of the author and situates his works in the historical and cultural context of his times. Peter Messent gives accessible but penetrating readings of the best-known writings including Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. He pays particular attention to the way Twain's humour works and how it underpins his prose style. The final chapter provides up-to-date analysis of the recent critical...

This book provides an overview of Mark Twain's work and a close critical analysis of the forms and themes of his major texts. The author uses recent cultural and literary theory to re-examine Twain's travel writing and fiction, writing in a jargon-free and accessible manner. He focuses on Twain's humour and his attitudes to such subjects as boyhood, nationality, race relations, technology, and capitalist expansion, and shows how his work reflects anxieties both about changes in the social and industrial order in post Civil-War America and the status of the individual within it.

Biographies of America's greatest humorist abound, but none have charted the overall influence of the key male friendships that profoundly informed his life and work. Combining biography, literary history, and gender studies, Mark Twain and Male Friendship presents a welcome new perspective as it examines three vastly different friendships and the stamp they left on Samuel Clemens's life.

With accessible prose informed by impressive research, the study provides an illuminating history of the friendships it explores, and the personal and cultural dynamic of the relationships. In...

The 1990s have seen significant and radical additions to American crime fiction, as the genre has mutated from Chandleresque traditions to a postmodernist fiction, marked especially by the collapse of the "safe" and distinct categories of criminal, detective and reader. This volume takes this collapse as a starting point and looks at how detective fiction in the US now operates from many different cultural and regional perspectives. The contributors examine the proliferation of subgenres, such as police and court procedures, and consider how this kind of writing taps into contemporary...

The Crime Fiction Handbook presents a comprehensive introduction to the origins, development, and cultural significance of the crime fiction genre, focusing mainly on American British, and Scandinavian texts.

• Provides an accessible and well-written introduction to the genre of crime fiction
• Moves with ease between a general overview of the genre and useful theoretical approaches
• Includes a close analysis of the key texts in the crime fiction tradition
• Identifies what makes crime fiction of such cultural importance and illuminates the social and...