A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889) (The ^AOxford Mark Twain) - Hardcover

Twain, Mark; Fishkin, Shelley Fisher

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0195101413 ISBN 13: 9780195101416

Publisher: Oxford University Press, 1996

Synopsis

A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court is one of Twain's best-loved tales. A pioneering work of science fiction, it vibrates with slapstick comedy and serious social commentary as well. In this complex and ambitious tour de force, an inventive nineteenth-century resident of Hartford named Hank Morgan travels back in time to sixteenth-century England where he tries to introduce modern technology and political ideas. Along the way he founds the first tabloid, the Camelot Weekly Hosannah and Literary Volcano, organizes a game of baseball between armor-clad knights, and "keeps up a steady fire of flippancies, so frequent that no reader registers all of them on the first go-around," as Louis Budd reminds us in his introduction. A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court is Twain's most complex and disturbing meditation on technology, as well as a powerful consideration of politics and power. The original illustrations by Dan Beard, chosen by Twain himself to illustrate the book, brilliantly mix buffoonery with sharp social satire in an effective counterpoint to the text. By turns side-splittingly funny and somberly thought-provoking, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court is Twain at his finest.

About this title

From the Publisher:

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From the Inside Flap:

This novel tells the story of Hank Morgan, the quintessential self-reliant New Englander who brings to King Arthur's Age of Chivalry the "great and beneficent" miracles of nineteenth-century engineering and American ingenuity. Through the collision of past and present, Twain exposes the insubstantiality of both utopias, destroying the myth of the romantic ideal as well as his own era's faith in scientific and social progress.
A central document in American intellectual history, "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court is at once a hilarious comedy of anachronisms and incongruities, a romantic fantasy, a utopian vision, and a savage, anarchic social satire that only one of America's greatest writers could pen.

About this edition

• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Publication date: 1996
• ISBN 10: 0195101413
• ISBN 13: 9780195101416
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 656