Analysing Linguistic Stylistic Devices in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and So Long a Letter: A Comparative Appraisal

This research work focuses on linguistic stylistic analysis of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Mariama Bâ’s So Long a Letter. It aims to identify the various translation procedures used in each novel in order to establish a comparison between the different translation procedures and style of each translator of modern and old English. A sampling method has been used to carry out this research work. Thus, one extract has been selected with its corresponding translation from the French and English versions of each novel. The results show that, in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, the translator has used predominantly adaptation for his translation representing 32.32% in both selected extracts whereas in So Long a Letter, the translator has adopted predominantly literal translation representing a proportion of 28.48% in order to preserve the sustained register of the source text. However, both translators have also used other translation procedures in lower proportions depending on the context orientation. It has been noted that translation methods such as calque has been used only once whereas borrowing is nonexistent in the selected extracts from both literary works.

For Who the River Carries: Marginalised Perspectives on Twentieth-Century Literature

<p>This thesis examines the representation of rivers from marginalised American authors of the twentieth-century. American rivers are notably diverse and variable natural features, and as symbols they offer extensive metaphorical potential. Rivers also hold a rich literary history in America, notably in the work of canonical nineteenth-century writers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry D. Thoreau, Walt Whitman, and Mark Twain. The idealised depictions found in the work of these four authors act as a foundation which the marginalised writers of the following century both develop and subvert. The selected marginalised writers fall into three overlapping categories, to each of which is devoted a chapter. To examine those marginalised by economy and class, I have turned to Cormac McCarthy’s 1979 novel Suttree and the poetry of James Wright. Both concern themselves with poverty, river pollution, theology, suicide, and the desolation of American idealism. In my chapter on African American writing, Toni Morrison’s 1987 novel Beloved and selected poems by Sterling A Brown, Audre Lorde, and Margaret Walker are the central texts. These works look to the river and find racial history within its current, evoking varied responses surrounding memory, trauma, creative expression, and recontextualisation. The final chapter explores William S. Burroughs’s 1987 novel The Western Lands and the work of Minnie Bruce Pratt. By “queering nature,” the river becomes both a bitter reminder of their marginalisation and a hopeful symbol of utopia and unity. Together, these texts and the rivers they represent demonstrate the disjuncture between the privileged and marginalised in America, calling for greater consideration of what we deem “American” and why.</p>

For Who the River Carries: Marginalised Perspectives on Twentieth-Century Literature

<p>This thesis examines the representation of rivers from marginalised American authors of the twentieth-century. American rivers are notably diverse and variable natural features, and as symbols they offer extensive metaphorical potential. Rivers also hold a rich literary history in America, notably in the work of canonical nineteenth-century writers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry D. Thoreau, Walt Whitman, and Mark Twain. The idealised depictions found in the work of these four authors act as a foundation which the marginalised writers of the following century both develop and subvert. The selected marginalised writers fall into three overlapping categories, to each of which is devoted a chapter. To examine those marginalised by economy and class, I have turned to Cormac McCarthy’s 1979 novel Suttree and the poetry of James Wright. Both concern themselves with poverty, river pollution, theology, suicide, and the desolation of American idealism. In my chapter on African American writing, Toni Morrison’s 1987 novel Beloved and selected poems by Sterling A Brown, Audre Lorde, and Margaret Walker are the central texts. These works look to the river and find racial history within its current, evoking varied responses surrounding memory, trauma, creative expression, and recontextualisation. The final chapter explores William S. Burroughs’s 1987 novel The Western Lands and the work of Minnie Bruce Pratt. By “queering nature,” the river becomes both a bitter reminder of their marginalisation and a hopeful symbol of utopia and unity. Together, these texts and the rivers they represent demonstrate the disjuncture between the privileged and marginalised in America, calling for greater consideration of what we deem “American” and why.</p>

Pain and the Aesthetics of US Literary Realism

This book examines the cultural pursuit of a painless ideal as a neglected context for US literary realism. Advances in anesthesia in the final decades of the nineteenth century together with influential religious ideologies helped strengthen the equation of a comfortable existence insulated from physical suffering with the height of civilization. Theories of the civilizing process as intensifying sensitivity to suffering were often adduced to justify a revulsion from physical pain among the postbellum elite. Yet a sizeable portion of this elite rejected this comfort-seeking, pain-avoiding aesthetic as a regrettable consequence of over-civilization. Proponents of the strenuous cult instead identified pain and strife as essential ingredients of an invigorated life. The Ache of the Actual examines variants on a lesser known counter-sensibility integral to the writings of a number of influential literary realists. William Dean Howells, Henry James, Edith Wharton, Mark Twain, and Charles Chesnutt each delineated alternative definitions of a superior sensibility indebted to suffering rather than to either revulsion from or immersion in it. They resolved the binary contrast between pain-aversion on one side and pain-immersion on the other by endorsing an uncommon responsiveness to pain whose precise form depended on the ethical and aesthetic priorities of the writer in question. Focusing on these variations elucidates the similarities and differences within US literary realism while revealing areas of convergence and divergence between realism and other long-nineteenth-century literary modes, chief among them both sentimentalism and naturalism, that were similarly preoccupied with pain.

Stubborn Fractions

Unlike his high realist colleagues, Mark Twain remained ambivalent about both a painless ideal and the potentially refining value of exposure to pain. He conveys this ambivalence by habitually relying on fractions when assessing the extent to which he believed pain could or should be eradicated. This chapter situates Twain’s reliance on fractions within the context of his fascination with Christian Science. While Mary Baker Eddy drew on religious principles in order to evoke a utopian world blissfully free of pain, Twain’s own aesthetic imagination repeatedly conjured a world in which pain played a manageable yet still valuable part. For him, that value resided largely in suffering’s capacity to enhance not already refined sensibilities as in high realism but the capacity for imaginative projection into the lives of others. His writings reliably suggest, however, that only exceptional individuals had what it took imaginatively to make anything other than their own suffering a priority.

An Analysis of Mark Twain’s Ecological Narratives

American writer Mark Twain has witnessed changes of American environment of the 19th century, which changes his sense of place. Urbanization and industrialization separate human beings from nature, leading to various conflicts. City is always regarded as the symbol of order, reason, crime and degeneration, while nature means freedom and happiness. Twain advocates the return to nature to lead a simple life. He tries to reveal the ecological crisis in the 19th century and express his ecological concepts through redefining &ldquo;place&rdquo;, &ldquo;space&rdquo; and son on.