King Arthur's Court Research Articles

Fun with Nitroglycerin: Piecing Together the “Exploding Boy” Plagiarism Controversy

Fun with Nitroglycerin: Piecing Together the “Exploding Boy” Plagiarism Controversy

Realism and Power in Mark Twain's

Realism and Power in Mark Twain's

Amy Kaplan on Realism and the Imperatives of Empire

Amy Kaplan on Realism and the Imperatives of Empire

Amy Kaplan and the McDonaldization of Mark Twain

Amy Kaplan and the McDonaldization of Mark Twain

Race, Sex, and God

Race, Sex, and God

Now is the Time for A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court

Now is the Time for A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court

The Life of Mark Twain: The Middle Years, 1871–1891

The Life of Mark Twain: The Middle Years, 1871–1891

"Huck Finn at King Arthur's Court"

F. O. Matthiessen was a key player in an event which took place at Schloss Leopoldskron in Salzburg in the summer of 1947 and which launched the legendary Salzburg Seminar and may be considered the birth of American studies in Europe. Matthiessen's reflections on this remarkable session, From the Heart of Europe, remains outstanding in its conjuring of a humanist vision amidst ruins. This travelogue, his last major—if largely forgotten—work published shortly before his suicide, has been variously reassessed as an elegiac document of his tragic failure, as a politically deluded scholar, and as a groundbreaking foray into sketching out a radically alternate transnational understanding of American studies avant la lettre. These highly diverging perspectives on Matthiessen's final book, in particular, and on the professional and personal troubles during his last years, more generally, account for the lasting myth-making fascination with Matthiessen, which has left its mark not only on academic discourses ranging from socialist criticism to queer theory but may also be found in the novels of May Sarton (Faithful Are the Wounds) and Mark Merlis (American Studies). Hence, this article reflects on Matthiessen's impact on the 1947 seminar and traces the legacy of this controversial founding father of American studies.

Financing a Green New Deal

The Great Depression galvanized the New Deal in the United States to recover the economy, relieve the poor and unemployed, and reform the financial backbone of the country. Today, the impending adverse effects of climate change have governments proposing analogous Green New Deals. Recently in Energy Research & Social Science, Galvin and Healy critically examine the economic viability and wide-spanning societal, monetary, and environmental implications of the US Green New Deal proposals.

The Life of Mark Twain: The Middle Years, 1871–1891

The Life of Mark Twain: The Middle Years, 1871–1891

James Bond, A Grifter, A Video Avatar, and a Shark Walk into King Arthur's Court: The Ever-Expanding Canon of Cinema Arthuriana

James Bond, A Grifter, A Video Avatar, and a Shark Walk into King Arthur's Court: The Ever-Expanding Canon of Cinema Arthuriana

Mark Twain among the Indians and Other Indigenous Peoples

Mark Twain among the Indians and Other Indigenous Peoples

Gears and God: Technocratic Fiction, Faith, and Empire in Mark Twain's America

Gears and God: Technocratic Fiction, Faith, and Empire in Mark Twain's America

Contracts, Activist Feminism, and the Wife of Bath's Tale

Abstract In contrast to an enduring association of the law with hegemonic power, the Wife of Bath's Tale demonstrates the potential for legal practices to facilitate change, especially through tactical feminist coalition building. The tale does not promote the retributive model of justice associated with King Arthur's court, but embraces a vision of law, associated with the Queen and her female allies, that promotes social change through reeducation. Although elsewhere Chaucerian women are disempowered or objectified by the law, the tale's series of interlocking contracts empowers female agency rather than objectifying women. The shifting voices and audiences at the end present the contract as a tactic, not as a final solution to the precarity of women's safety or marital happiness. The lack of justice at the end of the tale—where a rapist is rewarded with a wife both faithful and fair—is a call to activism, not a vision of equity achieved.

A Populist in King Arthur's Court

Abstract Connecticut Yankee stands as one of Twain's most overtly political novels. Critics have read its protagonist, Hank Morgan, as anything from a progressive reformer to an authoritarian oppressor. This article attempts to explain some of Hank's contradictions by reading him as a populist in two intersecting ways. First, he serves as a figure for the workingman that was valorized by the late nineteenth-century People's Party. Second, his rhetoric suggests the lowercase-p populism that splits the political sphere into an insurgent form of “the people” and its elite “other.” Critics of populism argue that this structure is necessarily anti-democratic, and contemporary commentators often use populism as little more than a dirty word; however, this article argues that Connecticut Yankee offers further support to the claim that, at the very least, populism is an element of democracy and, at its best, can disrupt the political status quo in ways that help assert popular sovereignty.

Filmography of The Prince and the Pauper

Abstract The subject of filmed Mark Twain has only begun to be examined by scholars. Adaptations vary in format, production values, quality, and fidelity to the source material widely. Film versions of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn have received the bulk of critical attention, and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court seems to have inspired many filmmakers, but the Mark Twain work that appears to have produced the most adaptations is The Prince and the Pauper. In the almost 110 years since the first silent version premiered, ninety-five variations on the Tudor tale have been released, with these adaptations varying from traditional and highly faithful renditions to versions that connect by very slim similarities. The novel's plot has often been borrowed for episodes of television series, with stories involving previously unknown doubles and the switching of identities. This filmography traces and catalogs those adaptations that based on Mark Twain's novel.

31 - A Yankee in King Arthur's court, or an anal dysplasia NP within a colorectal surgery practice

Background Having been an HIV NP in upstate NY between the years of 1998 and 2009, it became apparent that High Resolution Anoscopy (HRA), was needed. Methods The University of Rochester and NYS Department of Health AIDS Institute provided the means for me to learn HRA and Infrared Photocoagulation (IRC) ablation of High Grade Squamous Intraepithelial Lesions (HSILs). The task was then to find a “home” in Rochester for this practice. Results Rochester Colon and Rectal Surgeons (RCRS), a private surgical practice, agreed in 2005 to let me establish an anal dysplasia practice within their eight surgeon group. 12+ years later, this anal dysplasia practice has screened and treated over 2000 patients. Initially, all referrals were HIV+ MSM, followed by HIV- MSM, HIV + women, and most recently HIV- women who have had cervical cancer or high grade dysplasia. Referrals come to me from HIV providers, Gynecologists, GYN Oncologists, Gastroenterologists, General Surgeons, Dermatologists, PCPs, and the colorectal surgeons within my own practice. In 2017, an monthly Anal Dysplasia Conference was convened to provide for citywide interdisciplinary (Pathologists, GYN Oncologists, Colorectal Surgeons and interested others) to review clinical findings, as well as to provide clinical correlation with projected cytology and pathology. Conclusions This anal dysplasia practice has resulted in the diagnosis, not only of HSILs and cancer, but also adenoma, lymphoma, primary squamous rectal cancers, molluscum, syphilis, as well as a plethora of the usual STDs. No regularly screened patient has developed squamous cell carcinoma within the anal canal, although two have developed squamous cell carcinomas of the anus.

Literary Regionalism and Mark Twain's Telephone

Abstract Focusing on the work of Mark Twain, this article considers the convergence of two late nineteenth-century voice technologies: dialect writing and the telephone. The racial and rural dialects transcribed by regionalist fiction offered mostly white, urban, middle-class readers entertaining encounters with “other” voices from a safe remove. The rhetoric surrounding the telephone's development promised that it would one day fulfill the same function in real time. But “the ideological power of dialect literature” (Gavin Jones) reinforced stereotypes rather than conveying geographically or socially distant voices to readers. Similarly, despite early fantasies of cross-cultural communication, the telephone facilitated socially insular conversation as it became systematized. Twain, however, emphasized the numerous miscommunications of the emergent telephone. Especially in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889), he debunked the myth of cultural contact promulgated by dialect writing and telephony by making readers question their ears.

A Knight on the Mississippi: Teaching Twain Within Arthuriana

Abstract Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court is often taught in courses dedicated to the Arthurian tradition. How does Twain both reproduce and create anew the character of King Arthur? What about Hank's impressions of Arthur are unique to Twain's novel and what harks back to the medieval origins of this legendary character? This article explores both the character of Arthur and the novel's conclusion, in light of the larger field of Arthuriana.

Sitting in Darkness: Mark Twain's Asia and Comparative Racializations

One may think that every conceivable approach to Mark Twain has already been explored. Yet here, Hsuan L. Hsu delivers an ambitious and original study that situates Twain's career in a transnational framework to shed light on the historical process of comparative racialization in the period of Chinese exclusion, Jim Crow, and U.S. imperialism. Through careful readings of Twain's works, some better known than others, alongside works by other writers and other types of texts such as law documents and visual illustrations, Hsu illuminates the interrelated mechanisms of racialization of not only Chinese immigrants and African Americans but also colonized populations such as the Filipinos, the Maoris, and the Congolese. Hsu discusses Twain in the context of concrete legal, economic, and social mechanisms of structural racism and racialization. In the first chapter, Hsu presents a reading of the play Ah Sin (1877), which Twain coauthored with Bret Harte to critique the California Supreme Court's decision in People v. Hall (1854). The decision extended the prohibition on “black” and “Indian” testimony to the Chinese, rendering the Chinese powerless against abuse and silencing them in the legal process. The second chapter discusses the figure of the vagabond in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) and Harte's short story “Three Vagabonds of Trinidad” (1900) in the context of legal and discursive constructions of vagrancy after Reconstruction that distributed mobility unevenly across racial lines. In chapter 3 Hsu presents a brilliant reading of the figure of the conjoined twins in Twain's The Comedy of Those Extraordinary Twins (1894) as embodiments of corporate personhood and monopoly capitalism in the Gilded Age. Together with an analysis of Pudd'nhead Wilson (first published as a serial in 1893–1894), this chapter examines the racialization of the Chinese “coolie” in relation to slaves, free blacks, working-class whites, and other immigrants. In the particularly fascinating fourth chapter, Hsu juxtaposes Twain's critique of the discourse of modernization and imperialism in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889), first with Twain's encounter with the Chinese Education Mission, which sent 120 Chinese boys to New England as part of China's modernization and nation-building efforts, and then with the writings of Wong Chin Foo, a lecturer, writer, entrepreneur, editor, and political organizer whose writings circulated among similar audiences as Twain's. This juxtaposition enables a unique contextualization for the discourses and practices of imperialism, modernization, and civilization, and a new understanding of Twain's critique through temporal and geographical resetting. In the somber last chapter, Hsu analyzes Twain's allegorical anti-imperialist nonfiction on topics ranging from the Philippine-American War (1899–1902) to King Leopold's atrocities in the Congo to illuminate the biopolitics of counting—and discounting—the dead.