Tom Sawyer is a boy's boy. He's mischievous, he's adventure seeking, he's fascinated with bugs. Yet while much has been written about these first two personality traits, it is the third one the unexamined territory of Tom's insectuous...

Even though Tom Sawyer is just a young boy in the chapter "Here a Captive Heart Busted," his actions cross the boundary of child's play and enter into the boundaries of wrongdoing. This comical, yet tedious chapter in Mark Twain's The Adventures...

Children as a whole have a propensity to rebel and cause mischief when they are younger, but this trait tends to disappear as they face challenges and begin to grow up. Mark Twain's classic novel from 1876, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, follows...

Sarcasm by definition entirely changes the way a comment or sometimes whole event is interpreted, often flipping a subject on its head, altering the original obvious meaning and revealing it to be the near opposite. In The Adventures of Tom...

Being a pariah, or at least being labeled one, can change a person’s life, and not for the better. Huckleberry Finn, the town “pariah,” is called and treated as an outcast for many reasons, but mainly, because he’s different. Huck Finn is the...

Of the many puzzles and questions woven throughout Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer, perhaps the most salient of all is the bizarre and often-times self-contradictory relationship between the various children of St. Petersburg and their adult counterparts....

"American literature is male. To read the canon of what is currently considered classic American literature is perforce to identify as male; Our literature neither leaves women alone nor allows them to participate." Judith Fetterley (Walker, 171)

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There is no doubt that Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court is marred by structural absurdities, flawed changes in tone, and a stuttering, episodic arrangement. The novel often attempts to do far too many things at once, juggling...

Written in 1889, Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court is regarded by many scholars as the most important of American Arthuriana. Twain strips Arthurian legend of much of its glory and grandeur, thereby making it possible for...

The late nineteenth century in the United States saw the peak of the buzz and commotion that is presently known as the Industrial Revolution. Caught deep within the gears of this mechanized movement, both socially and financially, was one Samuel...

Pudd’nhead Wilson is a novel written by Mark Twain that tells the story of two near-twins who were switched at birth. The babies were interchanged because Roxana, the enslaved mother of one child, Chambers, wanted to save her son from the horrors...

"American literature is male. To read the canon of what is currently considered classic American literature is perforce to identify as male; Our literature neither leaves women alone nor allows them to participate." Judith Fetterley (Walker, 171)

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It is often debated whether one’s character is instilled at birth, or through the environment in which one is raised. Mark Twain’s novel Pudd’nhead Wilson argues the latter through describing the development of two boys of the same age, Chambers...

America has undeniably come a long way from its dark adolescence prior to Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation in becoming a global icon of ethnic diversity. No longer are African Americans relegated to indentured servitude or the “black” water...

Mark Twain’s Pudd'nhead Wilson and Charles Chesnutt’s The House Behind the Cedars both problematize the concept of race by demonstrating to the reader that subscriptions to stereotypes warranted by skin color are ambiguous and consequently not at...

Humans possess the innate need to simplify and categorize the complexities of human identity. For the purposes of this paper, fingerprinting, DNA typing and gene mapping are modern day manifestations of the idea that identity is located on the...

"This above all- to thine own self be true, /And it must follow, as the night the day, / Thou canst not then be false to any man” (Hamlet, 1.3.154-56). As Shakespeare so eloquently wrote, finding oneself is the key to truth. This idea is a...

In 1895, Mark Twain put his formula for how to tell a humorous story down on paper. The speaker should know how and when to deliver the punchline, learn to be apparently indifferent to his own humor, and exhibit mastery of the pause. Some years...

In many of Whitman's Civil War poems, he focuses on dead or wounded soldiers and draws particular attention to grotesque, often disturbing images. In "A March in the Ranks Hard-Prest," he writes, "Surgeons operating, attendants holding lights, the...

Samuel Longhorn Clemens, under the pseudonym Mark Twain, uses southwestern dialects and local vernaculars to create realistic characters that accurately reflect the people and familiar scenes of mid-nineteenth century Southern American life. In...

A gambler is nothing but a man who makes his living out of hope.”(Bolitho). In “The Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras County,” the narrator introduces Simon Wheeler by asking for a man named Leonidas W. Smiley. Instead of indicating the narrator...

The Diaries of Adam and Eve is a comical interpretation of the traditional creation story by Mark Twain. With a personal touch of his depiction to the characters of Adam and Eve, Twain managed to marry his previously written short stories, Adam's...

Storytelling has become an important literary device found in American Literature. Stories like “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” by Mark Twain and “Daisy Miller: A Study” by Henry James use storytelling as the simplest way promote...

The Prince and the Pauper by Mark Twain tells the story of a prince, named Edward, and a pauper, named Tom, who switch identities out of curiosity. Both living in 16th century England, the lifestyles they had lived were very different. Tom grew up...