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"A fresh perspective on the early years of Samuel Clemens's career as a writer and newspaper reporter. Caron examines Clemens's developing comic voice in his journalism in Nevada and San Francisco, then in the travel letters from Hawaii and letters chronicling his trip from California to New York City"--Provided by publisher.
The humor of the Old South—tales, almanac entries, turf reports, historical sketches, gentlemen's essays on outdoor sports, profiles of local characters—flourished between 1830 and 1860. The genre's popularity and influence can be traced in the works of major southern writers such as William Faulkner, Erskine Caldwell, Eudora Welty, Flannery O'Connor, and Harry Crews, as well as in contemporary popular culture focusing on the rural South. This collection of essays includes some of the past twenty five years' best writing on the subject, as well as ten new works bringing fresh insights and original approaches to the subject. A number of the essays focus on well known humorists such as Aug...
Widely recognized in his character of the Tramp, Charlie Chaplin transcended the role of actor to become screenwriter, director, composer, producer, and finally studio head. The subject of numerous biographical studies, Chaplin has been examined as both myth and man, but these treatments fail to adequately address the often-overlooked complexity of his filmmaking. Refocusing Chaplin: A Screen Icon through Critical Lenses features essays that examine the actor and director through various theoretical perspectives—including Marxism, feminism, gender studies, deconstruction, psychoanalytic criticism, new historicism, performance studies, and cultural criticism. Complementing this range of int...
In Minstrelsy and Murder, Andrew Silver locates the foundation of the South’s dark humor in the great and violent cultural upheavals of the nineteenth century. Examining the connection between comic victimization and real acts of aggression, Silver shows southern humor to be a product not of America’s wholeness and national unity but of its internal fears, divisiveness, and perpetual civil strife. He focuses on the work of southern writers Augustus B. Longstreet, George Washington Harris, Charles Chesnutt, and Mark Twain, exploring a strain of regional humor that runs counter to the more familiar American comic tradition. A profound distress about class emerges clearly in Silver’s read...
Charlie Chaplin was a skilled comedian, filmmaker and composer, and the mission of this book is to educate readers on the wide variety of Chaplin’s artistry: the subtlety of his mimetic satire, the sophistication of his film direction, and his prodigious musical skill that resulted in some of film’s greatest orchestral arrangements. This encyclopedia also emphasizes the singular nature of Chaplin’s biography: his unprecedented renown, the wide list of notables in art and culture with whom he fraternized, and the controversies that seemed to dog each stage of his life, perhaps most notably in his run-ins with the FBI and the House UnAmerican Activities Committee, both of whom suspected him of communist leanings. Charlie Chaplin: A Reference Guide to His Life and Works captures his life, and legacy. It features a chronology, an introduction that offers a brief account of his life, and a dictionary section listing entries on Chaplin’s childhood, career, family, and associates. The bibliography is one of the largest available of works concerning Chaplin.
From the Revolutionary War forward, Irish immigrants have contributed significantly to the construction of the American Republic. Scholars have documented their experiences and explored their social, political, and cultural lives in countless books. Offering a fresh perspective, this volume traces the rich history of the Irish American diaspora press, uncovering the ways in which a lively print culture forged significant cultural, political, and even economic bonds between the Irish living in America and the Irish living in Ireland. As the only mass medium prior to the advent of radio, newspapers served to foster a sense of identity and a means of acculturation for those seeking to establish...
Mocking Eugenics explores the opposition to eugenic discourse mounted by twentieth-century American artists seeking to challenge and destabilize what they viewed as a dangerous body of thought. Focusing on their wielding of humor to attack the contemporaneous science of heredity and the totalitarian impulse informing it, this book confronts the conflict between eugenic theories presented as grounded in scientific and metaphysical truth and the satirical treatment of eugenics as not only absurdly illogical but also antithetical to democratic ideals and inimical to humanistic values. Through analyses of the films of Charlie Chaplin and the fiction of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Anita Loos, and Wallace Thurman, Mocking Eugenics examines their use of laughter to dismantle the rhetoric of perfectionism, white supremacy, and nativism that shaped mainstream expressions of American patriotism and normative white masculinity. As such, it will appeal to scholars of cultural studies, literature, cinema, sociology, humor, and American studies.
Blockheads, Beagles, and Sweet Babboos: New Perspectives on Charles M. Schulz's "Peanuts" sheds new light on the past importance, ongoing significance, and future relevance of a comics series that millions adore: Charles M. Schulz’s Peanuts. More specifically, it examines a fundamental feature of the series: its core cast of characters. In chapters devoted to Charlie Brown, Snoopy, Lucy, Franklin, Pigpen, Woodstock, and Linus, author Michelle Ann Abate explores the figures who made Schulz’s strip so successful, so influential, and—above all—so beloved. In so doing, the book gives these iconic figures the in-depth critical attention that they deserve and for which they are long overdu...
This book is a literary exploration of Mark Twain's writings on crime in the American West and its intersection with morality, gender and justice. Writing from his office at the Enterprise newspaper in the Nevada Territory, Twain employed a distinct style of crime writing--one that sensationalized facts and included Twain's personal philosophies and observations. Covering Twain's journalism, fictional works and his own personal letters, this book contextualizes the writer's coverage of crime through his anxieties about westward expansion and the promise of a utopian West. Twain's observations on the West often reflected common perceptions of the day, positioning him as a "voice of the people" on issues like crime, punishment and gender.
Cosmopolitan Twain takes seriously Mark Twain's life as a citizen of urban landscapes: from the streets of New York City to the palaces of Vienna to the suburban utopia of Hartford. Traditional readings of Mark Twain orient his life and work by distinctly rural markers such as the Mississippi River, the Wild West, and small-town America; yet, as this collection shows, Twain's sensibilities were equally formed in the urban centers of the world. These essays represent Twain both as a product of urban frontiers and as a prophet of American modernity, situating him squarely within the context of an evolving international and cosmopolitan community. As Twain traveled and lived in these locales, h...