Mark Twain’s Rediscovery of America in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court

Abstract

Abstract Twain is famous for his jeremiads against European Imperialism and the United States’ fledgling efforts at colonial expansion in the Philippines; Twain’s name is frequently mentioned in discussions of anti-Imperialism as both a political movement and cultural ethos in the 122 literary culture and U.S. Imperialism turn-of-the-century United States. As scholars have pointed out, most of Twain’s anti-colonial zeal dates from the late 1890s and early 1900s, provoked by such international crises as the Spanish-American War (1898), the Boxer Rebellion in China (1900), and the Boer War in South Africa (1899”“1902). Twain’s rage over U.S. annexation of the Philippines in “To the Person Sitting in Darkness” (1901) and “A Defense of General Funston” (1902), the cruel despotism of Belgium’s Leopold II in the Congo Free State in “King Leopold’s Soliloquy” (1905), and Czar Nicholas II’s exploitation of Russians, Poles, and Finns in “The Czar’s Soliloquy” (1905) belongs to the historical period in which “Imperialism” had entered the popular vocabulary as a term of opprobrium.