Realism and Power in Mark Twain's

REVIEWS167 ornithopter. The knights appear, smiling in silent celebration as the awkward but determined little contraption makes its way into the sky. Lacking sex, violence, and profanity, The Mighty may not become a popular film. It is, however, a wonderful one for family viewing. BERT OLTON Palmyra, New York A Knight in Camelot, roger young, dir., Disney Television, 1998. Network premiere date: November 8, 1998. Among the most popular American Arthurian films are those based on the most American retelling of Arthurian material: the Connecticut Yankee transported to King Arthur's court, where he (and, more recently, she) must employ a remarkable degree of inventiveness to survive the adventure. Drawing, often very loosely, on Mark Twain's classic A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889), cinematic versions (discussed in greater detail in Kevin J. Harty's excellent on-line bibliography of Arthurian film at http:www.lib.rochester.edu/camelot/acpbibs/harty.htm) have included the popular silent film, A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur's Court (Fox, 1920); the sound picture, A Connecticut Yankee (Fox, 1931), starring Will Rogers; and the 1949 musical remake, A Connecticut Yankee in KingArthur's Court (Paramount), with Bing Crosby. Just as numerous have been the television interpretations, from Westinghouse Studio One's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1952) and Kraft Theatre's A Connecticut Yankee (ABC-TV, 1954) to A Connecticut Yankee (NBCTV , 1955), a restaging of Rodgers and Flart's 1927 musical, and Tennessee Ernie Ford Meets King Arthur (i960). Recent Yankees have included former Cosby-kid Keshia Knight Pulliam, transformed—in a 1989 made-for-television Christmas special— into a saccharine and precocious Connecticut kid, Karen Jones. Knocked off her horse during an after-school equitation class (this is, after all, Connecticut) and revived in Camelot, she uses a Polaroid camera, a Walkman, a tape recorder, and the other contents of her backpack to save the kingdom from the machinations of Merlin and the evil Mordred (bowdlerized for a younger audience into Arthur's nephew) before returning home via a hot air balloon that her friend Clarence has copied from one of her textbooks. More than any other srudio, Walt Disney Productions has turned to Arthurian themes, particularly the theme ofthe return to Camelot. In UnidentifiedFlying Oddball (1979), released in Britain as The Spaceman and King Arthur, for instance, a NASA malfunction sends robotics engineerTomTrimble (Russ Mayberry) to Arthur's court, where he uses his 'magic' (including a flame-retardant space suit, a lookalike robot named FIermes, and the thrusters and magnetic fields of his spacecraft) to win a seat at the Round Table and to facilitate his return to the present. A much younger traveler makes a similar journey in another Disney production, A Kid in KingArthur's Court (1995). Thirteen-year-old Calvin Fuller (Thomas Ian Nicholas) falls through an earthquake crack during a Little League game and ends up in Camelot, where Merlin l68ARTHURIANA has need of a 'Knight' (the name of Calvin's team) to defeat the evil Belasco and to restore Camelot to its former glory. (The Arthurian story, however, is far better told in another 1995 Disney film, Four Diamonds, a made-for-television cable release about Chris Millard, a young boy whose story about a squire in Arthut's coutt parallels his own life; using, as Kevin Harty noted in a review of the film in this journal, 'one of the key tropes ofthe Arthurian legend, the return to Camelot—a return, in this case, for healing,' the film follows Chris's attempts to earn the four diamonds ofthe knight— courage, wisdom, honesty, and strength.) In the most recent version ofTwain's novel,/! Knight in Camelot (DisneyTelevision, 1998), the Yankee is Dr. Vivien Morgan (Whoopi Goldberg), a dreadlocked, fasttalking physicist from West Cornwall, Connecticut. When an experiment with gravitational particles sends her back to Camelot, she is captured by Sir Sagramour (Robert Addie); brought before the king (Michael York); and thrust into adventures both familiar (a sentence to burn at the stake—averted, in this case, by reference to the 'Scientific Fiistory/Natural Disasters' file on her laptop computer) and original (the tortures proposed by a jealous Guinevere [Amanda...

Shock & Awe: American Exceptionalism and the Imperatives of the Spectacle in Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. William v. spanos, Shock & Awe: American Exceptionalism and the Imperatives of the Spectacle in Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. Re-Mapping the Transnational: A Dartmouth Series in American Studies. Hanover, New Hampshire: Dartmouth University Press, 2013. Pp. xviii, 222. isbn: 978-1-61168-462-9. $40.Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889), the story of nineteenth-century Hartford resident Hank Morgan who suffers a blow to his head and awakens in the sixth-century England of King Arthur, is a seminal book in the American literary canon. Over the years, it has been read many ways: as a 'contrast' between Arthurian times and the present (to use Twain's own word), as a brilliant satire and social critique, as a burlesque, as a political commentary, as a foundational work in the science fiction subgenre of time travel, and, of course, as a masterpiece of American Arthuriana.William V. Spanos' study Shock & Awe proposes a new and provocative reading of Twain's landmark novel. Inspired by the foreign policy entanglements of recent years, Spanos offers a fresh assessment of the place of a global America in the American imaginary. He argues that Twain identifies with the character of Hank Morgan, particularly in his defining use of spectacle, and therefore with an American exceptionalism that anticipates the George W. Bush administration's normalization of the state of exception and the imperial policy of 'preemptive war,' unilateral 'regime change,' and 'shock and awe' tactics.In his initial chapters, Spanos outlines his study and offers an overview of both his argument and his methodology. He establishes the 'ideological context' for reading the literary criticism on Connecticut Yankee 'by undertaking a genealogy of the American exceptionalism' that he believes is at the 'thematic heart of the novel'; and he provides the 'historical context-the particular techno-scientific avatar of the American exceptionalist ethos-at the time of the closing of the American frontier at the end of nineteenth century, when Twain was writing the novel.' A more detailed critical analysis of the dominant representations of Connecticut Yankee follows and is divided into several parts: 'the early representations, contemporary with Twain, which interpret the novel as a celebration of the exceptionalism of the American nation at the end of the nineteenth century (phase 1); the later, Cold-War ones, which, troubled by the contradictory excessive violence of the climactic Battle of the Sand Belt, read the novel as a noble failure (phase 2); and the latest ones, encompassing the period between the Vietnam and the War on Terror in the wake of September 11, 2001, which categorically-without commenting on the anxieties expressed in phase 2-distinguish an anti-imperialist Twain from his protagonist's techno-capitalistrepublican- imperial project on feudal England (phases 3 and 4)' (p. …

The common characterization of Mark Twain as an uneducated and improvisational writer took hold largely because of the novelist's own frequent claims about his writing practices. But using recently discovered evidence--Twain's marginal notes in books he consulted as he worked on A Yankee in King Arthur's Court--Joe Fulton argues for a reconsideration of scholarly views about Twain's writing process, showing that this great American author crafted his novels with careful research and calculated design. Fulton analyzes Twain's voluminous marginalia in the copies of Macaulay's History of England, Carlyle's History of the French Revolution, and Lecky's History of the Rise of Rationalism and England in the Eighteenth Century available to Twain in the library of Quarry Farm, the New York farm where the novelist and his family routinely spent their summers. Comparing these marginal notes to entries in Twain's writing journal, the manuscript of Connecticut Yankee, and the book as published in 1889, Fulton establishes that Twain's research decisively influenced the novel. Fulton reveals Twain to be both the writer from experience he claimed to be and the careful craftsman that he attempted to downplay. By redefining Twain's aesthetic, Fulton reinvigorates current debates about what constitutes literary realism. Fulton's transcriptions of the marginalia appear in an appendix; together with his analysis, they provide a valuable new resource for Twain scholars.

Research Article| January 01 2010 Hank Morgan's Power Play: Electrical Networks in King Arthur's Court JENNIFER L. LIEBERMAN JENNIFER L. LIEBERMAN Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google The Mark Twain Annual (2010) 8 (1): 61–75. https://doi.org/10.2307/41582279 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation JENNIFER L. LIEBERMAN; Hank Morgan's Power Play: Electrical Networks in King Arthur's Court. The Mark Twain Annual 1 January 2010; 8 (1): 61–75. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/41582279 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectivePenn State University PressThe Mark Twain Annual Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © 2010 Mark Twain Circle of America2010Mark Twain Circle of America Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

A Kid in King Arthur's Court is a 1995 Disney modernization of Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. Whereas Twain’s bizarre Gothic setting frames the narrative and generates magical transformation and ambivalent relationship between the protagonist and the medieval world through a vibrant textual encounter, the Disney version’s fantastic journey is opened up by the familiar baseball field which, while appealing to juvenile audience, does not seem to invite serious inquiry. However, the film demonstrates an intricate process of translation, in which the cinematic rendition of the otherness of Arthurian legend to its prospective viewers involves a twofold gothic translation of both medieval culture and contemporary popular culture. Despite its reductive appropriation of some of Twain’s motifs, the movie witnesses how popularized Arthurian legend as familiarized difference can continue to inspire an-other novel perspective on the everyday. Perhaps Arthurians need to accustom themselves to the uncanny experience in popular culture’s domestication of the medieval/Gothic other in which what is familiar to them becomes unsettlingly unfamiliar. The Arthurian tradition is almost synonymous with Arthurian translation, a vigorously contested process that always reinvents the other side of the legend and explores the dynamics between the familiar and the fantastic.

Research Article| January 01 2007 Cowboys and Indians in King Arthur's Court: Hank Morgan's Version of Manifest Destiny in Mark Twain's “Connecticut Yankee” John H. Davis John H. Davis Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google The Mark Twain Annual (2007) 5 (1): 83–92. https://doi.org/10.2307/41561754 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation John H. Davis; Cowboys and Indians in King Arthur's Court: Hank Morgan's Version of Manifest Destiny in Mark Twain's “Connecticut Yankee”. The Mark Twain Annual 1 January 2007; 5 (1): 83–92. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/41561754 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectivePenn State University PressThe Mark Twain Annual Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © 2008 Mark Twain Circle of America2008Mark Twain Circle of America Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

It has never been simple to define Mark Twain's place in American literary realism. His fiction is prized for its fidelity to American vernacular speech. But Twain's penchant for plots structured like tall tales or absurdist dreams led W. D. Howells to dub him a "romancer." He shared with other realists the aspiration to be an "expert" observer capable of submitting a "valuable report" of the life of a people.1 But Twain's is not the realism of the probable, the empirical, or the observable. His brand of literary realism is attuned instead to the invisible movements of geopolitical forces—to a "serious theory of history," as Matthew Seybold puts it. This, at least, is the Mark Twain that Amy Kaplan depicts in "Realism Against Itself," in an analysis of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court that has been extracted from her doctoral dissertation and published in this issue for the first time. Beginning with this essay, and developed in her later writings on Twain, Kaplan makes the compelling case that Twain's realism cannot be understood apart from the context of U.S. imperialism. For Kaplan's Mark Twain, reality is to be found amidst the unintended consequences of empire. Like a hidden god, the real cannot be observed directly, but it makes itself known in the wreckage that follows from imperial fantasies unleashed at home as well as abroad.To give form to his vision of history, Twain experimented with representing the contours of time. Fiction afforded ways to merge different epochs into new virtual worlds, temporal palimpsests capable of disclosing the inner workings of human history. Connecticut Yankee tempts readers with the notion that that the soul of Gilded Age America—its governing drives, its mental habits and fondest desires—would emerge in relief against the background of medieval England. Yankee, know thyself. In Kaplan's incisive view, however, this fabulist framework sets a cunning trap. To imagine starting industrial society from scratch is already to fall prey to a distinct kind of wishfulness. Even as a counterfactual game of the imagination, the time-travel plot of Twain's novel taps into the doctrine—call it a Yankee article of faith—that endemic social conflicts can be resolved in the right kind of managed environment. Through Hank Morgan's eyes, readers can imagine a cleansed reality: workers without labor revolts, bosses without bureaucracies, factories without cities.The fantastic plot is thus a realist plot inasmuch as it enacts a core fantasy of Twain's America: the wish that the social conflicts churned up by corporate capitalism could be purified and controlled. Kaplan's innovation is to locate Twain's critique not in Connecticut Yankee's themes or plotline but in the way the novel mobilizes a structure of tacit expectations and desires. To take up the novel's pleasures and puzzles is perforce to entertain a form of modern magical thinking, the ingrained belief that technological and rational advances serve to resolve social conflicts rather than generate them. Kaplan calls Hank Morgan a "culture hero" and the label is apt. By virtue of his birth in the nineteenth century, Hank's mundane knowledge of fireworks and printing presses become gnostic powers. His story appears to turn something ideological, a belief in social progress, into something empirical—it makes progress as real as soap. Social change can thus be conceived as the solution, not the engine, for what is most vexing in Twain's America.Because this structure of experience it built on its own impossible desire, however, in the end the operative fantasy implodes. What Kaplan calls "the internal logic of the text" dictates that Hank Morgan's reforms will intensify the social conflicts they were meant to resolve. But trying to solve insoluble problems is not just an error; it is a willfulness that leads to unanticipated, or at least undeclared, acts of escalating violence. The gifts of modern rationality and science also bring appallingly efficient events of mass death. Twain's shock-and-awe ending is disorienting, confronting the reader with images such as heaped-up corpses that are neither comic nor tragic. In enacting a Gilded Age desire to harness social change through top-down order, Hank exposes scientific management as an anarchic will to power.Kaplan contends that the novel's concern with technology and even progress are "subordinate to the struggle over social power." When one reads this 1982 essay today, its focus on social control as a species of power stands out as a preview of things to come. The essay contains the germ of Kaplan's extended effort to understand the place of the United States in the history of modern empire. Although it addresses coercions implicit in U.S. domestic culture, the essay uncovers a structure of feeling that Kaplan's later work will enlarge and refine as the repeating "anarchy of empire." It is striking that the process of writing Connecticut Yankee appears to have helped bend Twain's career toward themes of empire as well. Appearing in 1889, the story of Hank's adventures in premodern England looks like a trial run of sorts for the thematic terrain of imperialism that, as Seybold asserts, would come to preoccupy Twain in the last decade of his life. The twinning of national oppressions and U.S. foreign occupations in Twain's late writings, such as the manuscript on an "Eddypus" empire, point to the continuities between domestic and imperial governance that are at the heart of Kaplan's groundbreaking body of critical work.Framed in this way, Twain is less a practitioner of realism than a theorist of it. The essay offers a canny critical linkage between realism and the imperatives of empire. Kaplan argues that realists, literary and otherwise, are apt to try to produce or impose the reality they claim merely to uncover. It is in this sense that Kaplan calls Hank an exemplary "realist": he seeks to cut through obfuscation and false beliefs, but his realist disposition comes through most tellingly in his drive to make reality conform to an undisclosed blueprint. Under the pressure of Twain's plot, the tenets of realism intersect with the operations of imperialism. To make modernity and reality coincide, Hank must make new kinds of humans—he must "populate society with people who accept his structure of authority." Twain's "Man Factory" distills in a single image the ethos and epistemology of an industrializing empire: reality can be projected, imposed, realized. That doing so will eventually mean chaos and large-scale death is of little account.Whatever its power to transform, however, the imperial project will also fail to deliver on its promise of order. The reality principle as Twain understood it never fails to exert its own gravitational power; you will know it by the corpses and the legacy of misrule. Twain saw this as the hallmark of his own historical moment but also as a repeating pattern, a dynamic sure to recur in the future as long the United States would seek to operate as an empire. Kaplan gave this theory its most trenchant scholarly account. U.S. history, meanwhile, has supplied more supporting evidence. Under the banner of empire, to take one example, the George W. Bush administration endeavored to establish Man Factories in Iraq. A spokesman for "regime change" (a managerial term worthy of Hank Morgan) summarized the operative logic: "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality."2 The theory couldn't have been stated any more succinctly by Kaplan—or by Twain—but the anarchy that followed, unprecedented in scale, was no less shocking for its predictability.With its exceptional acuity, the essay provides an early demonstration of the intellectual potential that would be realized in Kaplan's distinguished scholarly career. For those who knew Amy Kaplan as a teacher, mentor, or colleague, the essay also bespeaks additional qualities that marked her work and life, among them her willingness to honor the work of other scholars while still striking out in bold new directions of thinking. Written just as she was launching herself in the profession, "Realism Against Itself" anticipates Kaplan's ability to combine far-seeing cultural critique with an unstinting generosity as an interlocutor, traits that would have a lasting influence on lives as well as scholarship across the span of an acclaimed career.

Many critics writing on Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee claim that the novel eludes easy interpretation because of its complex ironic twists, its juxtaposition of comedy and tragedy, and its penchant for pointing the sword of satire both at the pre-industrial Arthurian world and at Hank's own industrialized America. This confusion has led some critics to throw up their hands and write off the novel as one of Twain's artistic “failures.” However, exploring the novel's use of language and the role of story-telling, in particular, may shed light on its seeming ambiguity. A Connecticut Yankee explores the human capacity for both malice and mercy through the artifice and art of story-telling. From the first pages, the novel draws attention to the power of language to perpetrate violence and to mask it. This paper examines the novel's linguistic and narrative devices, especially the novel's juxtapositions of external differences—a Yankee in medieval England, different dialects, machinery in a pre-industrial age, and so forth—in order to argue that this time-travel tale ultimately reveals more crushing similarities than differences. The novel does not, then, present a linear story-line but rather uses narrative form to explore the overarching theme of human nature, which, regardless of time or of the structure of story, is consistent.

Conceptual contours of migration studies in and from Asia

A Young Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court directed by R.L. Thomas, and: A Kid In King Arthur's Court directed by Michael Gottlieb, and: Four Diamonds directed by Peter Werner (review)

Challenging the prevailing belief that Mark Twain's position on religion hovered somewhere between skepticism and outright heresy, Lawrence Berkove and Joseph Csicsila marshal biographical details of Twain's life alongside close readings of his work to explore the religious faith of America's most beloved writer and humorist. They conclude not only that religion was an important factor in Twain's life but also that the popular conception of Twain as agnostic, atheist, or apostate is simply wrong. 'Heretical Fictions' is the first full-length study to assess the importance of Twain's heretical Calvinism as the foundation of his major works, bringing to light important thematic ties that connect the author's early work to his high period and from there to his late work. Berkove and Csicsila set forth the main elements of Twain's countertheological interpretation of Calvinism and analyse in detail the way it shapes five of his major books--'Roughing It', 'The Adventures of Tom Sawyer', 'Adventures of Huckleberry Finn', 'A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court', and 'No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger'--as well as some of his major short stories. The result is a groundbreaking and unconventional portrait of a seminal figure in American letters.

In her paper, "Twain's novel A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court and U.S. Imperialism," Jennifer A. O'Neill argues that while it Twain's text is commonly viewed as an attack on monarchy and the Catholic church, one of the book's primary focuses is U.S. imperialism. In the scholarship of Twain's text some have acknowledged the text as a discussion of colonialism, most tend to see it as an exaltation of "civilizing" efforts rather than the scalding indictment it was clearly intended to be. Indeed, Twain embraced U.S. colonial efforts in the Pacific early in his life but by the time he wrote his novel, he was opposed to U.S. expansionist efforts. O'Neill argues that Twain's later public speeches and letters indicate dissatisfaction with colonial efforts. In O'Neill's analysis, a careful reading of the novel and other pertinent sources show that this work has not been received in the manner Twain intended.

N the Mark Twain canon, one can find several all-out uprisings against the romantic mode, campaigns to drive its bad habits clean out of the American sensibility-and out of the author-and supplant them with plain-language representations of experience as ordinary people know it. adversary, in such fiction, often proves to be the personality seduced by romance, by sentimentality, by literary culture heavily and mindlessly ingested. Looking back over Huckleberry Finn, for example, one can see how romance, in the form of Tom Sawyer and his insistent fantasies, provides much of the shape of Mark Twain's best-known work; still, it is not easy to find in that text, or in Mark Twain's own commentary about it, evidence that he as yet recognized all the difficulties in being The Boss of the new American realism. There was much to learn, about how a creed of fidelity to the facts and common sense is neither simple nor pure, how mysteries lurked among his own assumptions about reality and truth, how the representation of truth can never escape the pull of romantic illusion or the structures and expectations of romance. Further, the grand-scale ideas that now overtook him, and against which he seemed, in his last quarter century, to have little immunity-traumatizing new doctrines about human nature, society, and consequencethreatened the coherence of the stories he wanted to tell and endangered the prospect of getting them told. There were failures coming, the most spectacular of them being A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Mark Twain's bold-

Theoretical particular purpose interest in in the the comic-parodic relationship between novel, as literature a form in and which society a recurrent is invested oscillation with Theoretical pa ticular purpose in the comic-parodic novel, s a form in which a ecurren o cillation of genres and narrative perspectives occurs only within a hierarchy where positioning is relational and perpetually contested, and where apparently common languages and values are revisited throughout the course of the novel.1 The Middle Ages, as Umberto Eco reminds us, is a popular site of ironic revisitation for the comic-parodic novelist, providing the opportunity to speculate about our infancy, of course, but also about the illusion of our senility (69). 2 As Eco goes on to point out, however, writers such as Ariosto and Cervantes do not revisit the Middle Ages as antiquarians but rather as purveyors of a period already refashioned by the romance tradition. To this company he might have added Mark Twain, who has been described by more than one critic as the Cervantes.3 The sixth century Middle Ages to which Twain sends Hank Morgan, his nineteenth-century middle class American hero in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, is in fact the fictive Middle Ages of Malory-the highly unreal and literary world of the idealistic, anachronistic romance(Kordecki 338), itself a fifteenth-century revisitation of the real sixth century. Responding to this romance/realism problematic, critical reactions to A Connecticut Yankee have generally fallen into one of two mutually exclusive schools: the first sees the novel as a farewell to the romance in American letters, a celebration of the vernacular, and

Although A Kid in King Arthur's Court may initially offer an exciting space of female agency within the typically masculinist confines of the Arthurian tradition, the agency of its heroines is drastically undermined as the male protagonists assert their patriarchal authority.