Puddn'head Wilson and Those Extraordinary Twins (Norton Critical Editions) - Softcover

Twain, Mark

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0393925358 ISBN 13: 9780393925357

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 2004

Synopsis

Pudd’nhead Wilson and Those Extraordinary Twins contain Twain’s most overt treatment of the moral and societal implications of slavery in America.

This Norton Critical Edition remains the only edition available that is based on completely re-edited texts, accounting for all versions that Twain might have written or influenced. All substantive variants in the two separate "first editions," one printed in Britain and the other in the United States, have been reconciled in this collated edition, with all rejected variants tabulated. Dozens of additional illustrations accompany the text, and all textual variants, accepted or rejected, are included. 

"Criticism" includes twenty-three reviews and interpretive essays, eight of them new to the Second Edition, including those by Andrew Jay Hoffman, Myra Jehlen, and John Carlos Rowe.

A Selected Bibliography is also included.

About this title

From the Inside Flap:

Featuring the brilliantly drawn Roxanna, a mulatto slave who suffers dire consequences after switching her infant son with her master's baby, and the clever Pudd'nhead Wilson, an ostracized small-town lawyer, Twain's darkly comic masterpiece is a provocative exploration of slavery and miscegenation. Leslie A. Fiedler described the novel as "half melodramatic detective story, half bleak tragedy," noting that "morally, it is one of the most honest books in our literature." "Those Extraordinary Twins, the slapstick story that evolved into Pudd'nhead Wilson, provides a fascinating view of the author's process.
The text for this Modern Library Paperback Classic was set from the 1894 first American edition.

From the Back Cover:

“Mark Twain, in his presentation of Negroes as human beings, stands head and shoulders above the other Southern writers of his times.”—Langston Hughes

About this edition

• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 0393925358
• ISBN 13: 9780393925357
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 2
• Number of pages: 488
• Editor: Berger Sidney E.