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Full-Text Articles in English Language and Literature
Making A Case For Mark Twain’S A Horse’S Tale: Twain’S Use Of Templates And Myths As His Highest Moralism, Sara Guggisberg, Dr. Frank Christianson
Making A Case For Mark Twain’S A Horse’S Tale: Twain’S Use Of Templates And Myths As His Highest Moralism, Sara Guggisberg, Dr. Frank Christianson
Journal of Undergraduate Research
Most of Mark Twain’s novels, full of sharp wit and relevant social commentary, suggest his strong ability to read people and create characters that endure through decades, while still concealing his own opinion on society beneath layers of sardonic criticism or feigned admiration. But A Horse’s Tale—an odd little novel about an orphan girl, her favorite horse named Soldier Boy (a gift from Buffalo Bill), and the bloody murder of both at the horns of a tortured bull—does not fit Twain’s typical formula. At first glance, this novel is full of earnest superlatives rendered trite, an uneven narrative arc, …
"Peculiar Insanity": Hereditary Sympathy And The Nationalist Enterprise In Twain's The American Claiment, Jared M. Pence
"Peculiar Insanity": Hereditary Sympathy And The Nationalist Enterprise In Twain's The American Claiment, Jared M. Pence
Theses and Dissertations
This thesis identifies a claimant narrative tradition in nineteenth-century American literature and examines the role of that tradition in the formation of American national identity. Drawing on Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The American Claimant Manuscripts and Our Old Home (1863) as well as Mark Twain’s The American Claimant (1892), I argue that these writers confronted the paradoxical nature of claimant narratives—what Hawthorne called a “peculiar insanity”—which combined a hereditary sympathy between the United States and Britain with exceptionalist rhetoric about American republican values. Hawthorne’s ambivalence toward the claimant tradition identified the paradox, but his writing merely pointed out inconsistencies, while Twain censured …