scholarly journals A Study of the Humor in Mark Twain’s Classic Works

2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (6) ◽  
pp. 1327
Author(s):  
Ling Wang

Mark Twain is a famous critical realist writer in the late nineteenth Century. Through combining humor and irony, he makes a relentless expose and criticism of the ugly phenomena in American social life. Humor is a unique way of thinking in his mind; he used humor to bring laugh to human. At the same time, he mercilessly criticized the ugly social reality, a profound reflection of the human condition in the world of metaphysical philosophy explores. The excellent satirical art in a number of his works showed, not only became an independent school at the time of the American literature, but also had a profound impact on the future of American literature. In this article, the author uses humor as a clue, and narrates the art of humor in Mark Twain's classic novels, the author will describe about the specific language and writing techniques from some classic novels of Mark Twain, to explore the art of humor embodied in the novel and the consequences of humor, so as to let the readers have a more intuitive and profound understanding of Mark Twain's novels, and also show the expression of noble tribute to Mark Twain for his outstanding achievement.

2014 ◽  
Vol 46 (1) ◽  
pp. 55-68
Author(s):  
James Dorson

The opposition between the world of work and the exchanges that constitute it, on the one hand, and that of intimacy and affect, on the other, has been a rich source of criticism on Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth ever since its publication in 1905. Through a close rereading of the novel in terms of emotional labor, this essay argues that the novel is less concerned with questioning the confluence of work and intimacy in the late nineteenth century than with the problems arising from attempts to separate them. By thematizing the problem of compensation for work that is meant to resemble leisure, The House of Mirth is read here as a story of the exploitation that results from refusing to recognize emotional labor as work. While calculation and intimacy are inextricably joined by economic necessity in the figure of Lily Bart, it is ultimately not the commodification of intimacy that destroys her, but the compulsive search for “the real Lily Bart” that her circle of friends engage in.


Author(s):  
Narges Raoufzadeh ◽  
Fatemeh Sadat Basirizadeh ◽  
Shiva Zaheri Birgani

This paper traces Foucault’s notion of power in Kate Chopin’s The Awakening. The writers bring into the light, different aspects of a woman’s position in the society of late nineteenth-century America. Paper looks at private and social conditions of women, using Foucault’s ideology of power, and discuss the reactions of Chopin’s protagonist in relation to her actions towards the workings of power in her life. With a close analysis of the novel based on Foucault’s ideology of power, researchers discuss the workings of power in the protagonist’s married and social life, including her efforts to set herself free from this power and her process of resistance analyzed according to Foucault’s theory. The research comes to the conclusion that the impossibility of acting outside power, the possibility of resisting power from within and Foucault’s “Care of the self” as the only way to traverse the power-defined failed of possible actions. Paper shows that, Chopin’s protagonist does not resist patriarchy based on Foucault’s methods and her actions towards power do not lead to any effective ending.


2017 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 173-197 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maxwell Uphaus

The burgeoning subfield of literary oceanic studies has largely neglected modernist literature, maintaining that the end of the age of sail in the late nineteenth century also marks an end to maritime literature's substantive cultural role. This essay outlines a way of reading the maritime in modernism through an analysis of the engagement with history and temporality in Joseph Conrad's sea novel The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’ (1897). The novel depicts the sea as variously an anachronistic sphere left behind by history, an integral foundation to history, an element that eclipses history, and an archive of history's repressed violence. This article traces the interactions of these various views of the sea's relationship to history, highlighting how they are shaped and inflected by the novel's treatment of race. Based on this analysis, it proposes an approach to the sea in modernist literature that focuses on its historiographical rather than social import.


Author(s):  
Leo Tolstoy

Resurrection (1899) is the last of Tolstoy's major novels. It tells the story of a nobleman's attempt to redeem the suffering his youthful philandering inflicted on a peasant girl who ends up a prisoner in Siberia. Tolstoy's vision of redemption achieved through loving forgiveness, and his condemnation of violence, dominate the novel. An intimate, psychological tale of guilt, anger, and forgiveness, Resurrection is at the same time a panoramic description of social life in Russia at the end of the nineteenth century, reflecting its author's outrage at the social injustices of the world in which he lived. This edition, which updates a classic translation, has explanatory notes and a substantial introduction based on the most recent scholarship in the field.


Author(s):  
Cristina Vatulescu

This chapter approaches police records as a genre that gains from being considered in its relationships with other genres of writing. In particular, we will follow its long-standing relationship to detective fiction, the novel, and biography. Going further, the chapter emphasizes the intermedia character of police records not just in our time but also throughout their existence, indeed from their very origins. This approach opens to a more inclusive media history of police files. We will start with an analysis of the seminal late nineteenth-century French manuals prescribing the writing of a police file, the famous Bertillon-method manuals. We will then track their influence following their adoption nationally and internationally, with particular attention to the politics of their adoption in the colonies. We will also touch briefly on the relationship of early policing to other disciplines, such as anthropology and statistics, before moving to a closer look at its intersections with photography and literature.


Itinerario ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 41 (2) ◽  
pp. 253-274
Author(s):  
John W. Troutman

In the late nineteenth century, Kānaka Maoli (Native Hawaiians) physically modified guitars and created a new technique for playing them. In the years that followed, hundreds of Hawaiian troupes, engaging new entertainment circuits that crisscrossed the globe, introduced the world to their “Hawaiian steel guitar,” from Shanghai to London, Kolkata to New Orleans. While performing Hawaiianmele, or songs, with their instrument, they demonstrated new virtues for the guitar’s potential in vernacular and commercial music making in these international markets. Based upon archival research, this essay considers the careers of several Hawaiian guitarists who travelled the world in the early twentieth century, connecting local soundscapes through the proliferation of an indigenous technology.


2003 ◽  
Vol 10 (suppl 1) ◽  
pp. 13-40 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jo Robertson

In the 1800s, humoral understandings of leprosy successively give way to disease models based on morbid anatomy, physiopathology, and bacteriology. Linkages between these disease models were reinforced by the ubiquitous seed/soil metaphor deployed both before and after the identification of M. leprae. While this metaphor provided a continuous link between medical descriptions, Henry Vandyke Carter's On leprosy (1874) marks a convergence of different models of disease. Simultaneously, this metaphor can be traced in popular and medical debates in the late nineteenth century, accompanying fears of a resurgence of leprosy in Europe. Later the mapping of the genome ushers in a new model of disease but, ironically, while leprosy research draws its logic from a view of the world in which a seed and soil metaphor expresses many different aspects of the activity of the disease, the bacillus itself continues to be unreceptive to cultivation.


2014 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 140
Author(s):  
LUDMYLLA MENDES LIMA

<p><strong>Resumo: </strong>O presente artigo trata de analisar o modo particular como Machado de Assis constrói a representação dos fatos históricos brasileiros no romance <em>Esaú e Jacó</em>. Este romance traz em seu enredo dois importantes fatos históricos ocorridos no final do século XIX: a Abolição da Escravatura, em 1888 e a Proclamação da República, em 1889. O tratamento literário dado pelo autor aos fatos, imprimindo irrelevância aos mesmos no contexto do enredo, revela que para ser Realista ‘à brasileira’, naquelas circunstâncias específicas, era necessário mostrar o curso da História tendo como base a ausência de transformação.</p><p><strong>Palavras-chave</strong>: Machado de Assis – <em>Esaú e Jacó</em> – História do Brasil.</p><p> </p><p><strong>Abstract: </strong>This paper intends to analyze the special way Machado de Assis builds the representation of Brazilian historical facts in the novel <em>Esaú e Jacó</em>. This novel brings in its plot two important historical events that happened in the late Nineteenth century: the Abolition of Slavery, in 1888; and the Proclamation of the Republic, in 1889. The literary treatment given by the author to the events, printing irrelevance to them, in the context of the plot, reveals that to build a Brazilian realism, in those circumstances, it was necessary to show the course of history based on the absence of transformation.</p><p><strong>Keywords</strong>: Machado de Assis – <em>Esaú e Jacó –</em> Brazilian History.</p>


2009 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 158-166 ◽  
Author(s):  
Juan Carlos Jaramillo Estrada

Born in the late nineteenth century, within the positivist paradigm, psychology has made important developments that have allowed its recognition in academia and labor. However, contextual issues have transformed the way we conceptualize reality, the world and man, perhaps in response to the poor capacity of the inherited paradigm to ensure quality of life and welfare of human beings. This has led to the birth and recognition of new paradigms, including complex epistemology, in various fields of the sphere of knowledge, which include the subjectivity, uncertainty, relativity of knowledge, conflict, the inclusion of "the observed" as an active part of the interventions and the relativity of a single knowable reality to move to co-constructed realities. It is proposed an approach to the identity consequences for a psychology based on complex epistemology, and the possible differences and relations with psychology, traditionally considered.


Author(s):  
Andrew Gibbons

Tragedy is a central theme in the work of Albert Camus that speaks to his 46 years of life in “interesting times.” He develops a case for the tragic arts across a series of letters, articles, lectures, short stories, and novels. In arguing for the tragic arts, he reveals an epic understanding of the tensions between individual and world manifest in the momentum of liberalism, humanism, and modernism. The educational qualities of the tragic arts are most explicitly explored in his novel The Plague, in which the proposition that the plague is a teacher engages Camus in an exploration of the grand narratives of progress and freedom, and the intimate depths of ignorance and heroism. In the novel The Outsider Camus explores the tragedy of difference in a society obsessed with the production of a normal citizen. The tragedy manifests the absurdity of the world in which a stranger in this world is compelled to support the system that rejects their subjectivity. In The Myth of Sisyphus Camus produces an essay on absurdity and suicide that toys with the illusion of Progress and the grounds for a well-lived life. Across these texts, and through his collection of letters, articles, and notes, Camus invites an educational imagination. His approach to study of the human condition in and through tragedy offers a narrative to challenge the apparent absence of imagination in educational systems and agendas. Following Camus, the tragic arts offer alternative narratives during the interesting times of viral and environment tragedy.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document