Bloom's Modern Critical Views - Mark Twain (2006) (271p) [Inua].pdf

Title: Mark Twain (Bloom's Modern Critical Views)
Editor: Harold Bloom
Series: Bloom's Modern Critical Views
Hardcover: 262 pages
Publisher: Chelsea House Pub (L); Updated edition (March 2006)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0791085694
ISBN-13: 978-0791085691

Description:
My introduction centers upon Huckleberry Finn, and emphasizes the secular sublimities of Twain’s loving study of his own nostalgia for the freedom of storytelling.
Bernard DeVoto’s overview of Twain’s career usefully integrates life, work, and socio-historical context.
The poet-critic T.S. Eliot returns to his own St. Louis boyhood to celebrate Huckleberry Finn as a tribute to the River, which like Huck has no beginning and no end.
Pudd’nhead Wilson is defended by F.R. Leavis, who finds in it a “moral astringency,” while the poet-novelist Robert Penn Warren formalistically analyzes both Huckleberry Finn and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court as structures that reflect Twain’s own creative anguish.
In an essay much in Twain’s own ironic spirit, James M. Cox revisits Life on the Mississippi, and commends the book for its most problematic aspects.
Selfhood and reality, a Twainian dialectic, is seen by Susan Gillman as central to this greatest of American humorists, after which Shelley Fisher Fishkin speculates upon the influence of African-American vernacular voices upon Twain’s language.
Innocents Abroad is the sphere in which Henry B. Wonham discovers Twain’s triumphant employment of the art of the tall tale, while Neil Schmitz brings us into the place found for his humor by Twain in the Civil War, who attempted to exorcise the Confederate ghost of Sir Walter Scott.
John Carlos Rowe amiably gives us Post-Colonialist Twain, who prophesies in A Connecticut Yankee our ongoing imperialism: think what Twain would have made of our Iraqi adventure!
In a final essay, we return to Huck Finn with Joseph L. Coulombe, who gives us a Huck natural-all-too-natural. (From the Editor’s Note)