MINISTRY OF HIGHER AND SECONDARY SPECIALISED EDUCATION OF THE REPUBLIC OF UZBEKISTAN
GULISTAN STATE UNIVERSITY
The English and Literature department
Kan Anna’s qualification work on speciality 5220100, English philology on theme:
Mark Twain’s Satire
Supervisor: Tojiev Kh.
Gulistan-2006
Contents
I. Introduction
1.1. General characteristics of the work
2.1. Some words about Mark Twain
II. Main part
1.2.Early life of Mark Twain
2.2. Beginning of literary career, Twain’s first successful experiences
3.2. Marriage and wife’s influence on Mark Twain’s literary works
4.2. “The Guilded Age” as the first significant work
5.2. Critical analysis of “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
6.2. “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” as the most significant work
7.2. Later years of Mark Twain
8.2. Simpletons abroad (American literature abroad)
III. Conclusion
1.3. Afterwards to Mark Twain’s literary significance
IV Bibliography
Introduction
1.1 General characteristics of the work
The theme of our qualification work sounds as following: “Mark Twain and his Satire” The brief characteristics of our work can be seen from the following features:
The topicality of this work causes several important points. We dare to say that Mark Twain always remains topical for us because his works, even written more than a century ago his immortal humor, tell about the modern things and phenomena which happen in our lives, such as humans’ qualities, the problems of friendship, support, greed, populism, childhood, love, revenge, etc. And our work becomes much more topical because of the reason that Mark Twain is still one of the most popular American writers read by readers. We are sure that there is hardly a man in our country can be found, who has never heard of adventures of Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, The Prince and the Pauper, Yankee from Connecticut, etc. We are also convincer that every intellectual learner of English has these works as hand-books for themselves. So the significance of our work can be proved by the following reasons:
a) Mark Twain for the American literature is of the same value as Chekhov for the Russians, Navoi for the Uzbeks, Gachec for the Checks, etc.
b) Though written about his times, humoristic works of Twain reflect the real state of affairs happened in our modern life, and even such scenes might happen with the readers of our qualification work.
c) Twain’s books are also worth studying for their brilliant humour, metaphoric language, ideas and dialogues within the works.
Having based upon the topicality of the theme we are able to formulate the general purposes of our qualification work.
a) To study, analyze, and sum up the humour- essence of Twain’s works.
b) To analyze humoristic works of the writer.
c) To prove the idea of modernity in Shakespeare’s “Midsummer Night”.
c) To mention and compare between themselves the critical opinions concerning to the play.
d) To take time parallels between Twain’s times and reality of nowadays.
e) To study Mark Twain’s heritage and greatness and significance on the base of his works “Huckleberry Finn”, “Tom Sawyer”, “Yankee from Connecticut”, “The Prince and the Pauper”.
If we say about the new information used within our work we may note that the work studies the problem from the modern positions and analyzes the modern trends appeared in this subject for the last ten years. For instance, the novelty concludes in a wide collecting of Internet materials dealing with Mark Twain’s heritage.
The practical significance of the work concludes in the following items:
a) The work could serve as a good source of materials for additional reading by students at schools, colleges and lyceums.
b) The problem of difficult understanding stylistic devices could be a little bit easier,
c) Those who would like to possess a perfect knowledge of English will find our work useful and practical.
d) Our qualification work is recognition of greatness of our outstanding American writer.
Having said about the scholars who dealt with the same theme earlier we may mention B.Shaw, A.Anikst, A.Paine, Dr.Jonson, Alfred Bates and many others.
We used in our work scientific approaches methods of general analysis.
The novelty of the work is concluded in including the modern interpretations of the Twain’s heritage.
Compositional structure of my work consists of four major parts – Introduction, Main part, Conclusion, and Bibliography. The brief content of each part is to be presented for your attention.
We subdivided the introductory material into two sections.. The first section gives some brief characteristics of the work, its aims and goals, problems and methods of investigation. The second item reveals common biographic milestones of Mark Twain, which were significant for the subject matter of our theme. The main part bears eight items in itself. Each items reveal the concrete problem. In the first paragraph we reflected the early years of Mark Twain’s life, precisely his young years, when Twain worked on the Mississippi, and the experiences of which were later reflected in all the works of satirist. The second item demonstrates the analysis of satirical works and his novel “Simpletons Abroad”. In the third paragraph of the main part we took into consideration the problem of the influence of wife onto the work of Twain. The fourth item tells us about the satiric novel “The Guilded Age”, - second serious work of Twain. The next two paragraphs of the main part take into consideration Mark Twain’s the most famous and magnificent works , in which his satirical talent appeared most greatly, - “Tom Sawyer” and “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” .The seventh item tells about the later years of Mark Twain, which were characterized by the crisis of his creative activity, upsetting the reality of life, and sharpening of social contradictions. The last paragraph tells about the history of the American literary invasion in Europe owing to appearance of Twain’s works. In the Conclusion work we gave some notes concerning the literary significance of Twain’s works, their novelty and actuality for modern readers. The qualification work contains to the bibliography , which mentions the list of literature used in the frame of our work.
2.1 Mark Twain - a great American writer - contributed an enormous contribution to literature of his country
Nevertheless, it is not all that would be possible to say about Twain. Mark Twain is one of the most important figures of the American life and the American culture as a whole. He was bound by the incalculable links with the move of development of his country, its national particularity, and social contradictions, and this link is felt deeply through all of his creative activity.
Leaving out of the folk layers, he became the brilliant representative of the American humanitarian intellectuals. Besides, under that layer, he did not "run", like many of his congeners, on the positions of dominating class, but he has occupied the critical position on all of the main questions concerning lives of his country, having criticized the politics dominating in his country, dominating religion, and dominating moral rules.
The importance of Twain as the artistic historian of the USA is difficult to overestimate.
Bernard Show once said that a researcher of the American society of the XIX century would have to come to address to Twain not less, than a historian of the French society of the XVIII century would have to treat to the works of Voltaire. In development of Bernard Show’s thought we think that it is necessary to add that those who want to knew more about the American life of the XX century, up to the most alive contemporary, will also find a lot of important and actual materials in Twain's works – with their shrewdness and generalizing power of the talent of this great American!
The importance and the role of Twain as the outrageously forming power in the American literature does not only weaken through the year passing, but it still becomes firmly established again and again with an increasing power.
"The whole modern American literature came out of one book of Mark Twain, which is identified as "Huckleberry Finn". This is the best of all our books... There was nothing like to be existed in our literature before it. Nothing which could be equal to this book has been still written ".
These words belong to one of the largest and most influential masters and trailblazers of the modern literature of the USA - to Ernest Hemingway.
“ Persuaded," wrote Bernard Shaw
As we wrote above, B. Show wrote about Mark Twain, "that the future historian of America will find your works indispensable to him as a French historian finds the political tracts of Voltaire." By his own participation, no artist in our literature save Lincoln is so broad a segment of typical American experience in the last century, Langhorne Clemens, known by the most famous pen name that an American ever bore, is a matchless annalist of his times. His life makes those Carry men in Boston and Concord and New York resemble the flowering of talents that blossomed in too retired a k. He knew the greatest river Mississippi of the continent as Melville knew the high. He witnessed the epic of America, the westward tide at its full, with option keener than the shallow appraisals of Bret Harte and Joaquin. When in his Autobiography Mark Twain recalls after forty years the faddy of an emigrant lad stabbed to death by a drunken comrade, and adds, the red life gush from his breast," we are reminded of Whitman's nation, "I was there"—with the difference that Walt's immediacy was genitive, Mark's actual. In the activities of the external man as well as in actor and temperament, Mark Twain was a representative American— idyllic ante-bellum boyhood in a river town, to maturity enmeshed in Toss-purposes of the Gilded Age which he christened, and thence to the years of mingled hope and disillusion in the Progressive Era. Despite we avowal, "There is not a single human characteristic which can be f labeled as 'American,' " Mark Twain is stamped unforgettably with the brand. If he failed finally to reconcile reality and ideality, he abs and gave expression to both. That failure was not his; it belonged to penetration age his incurably Calvinist mind saw all the events of his life, from son November 30, 1835, in the village of Florida, Missouri, as a chain of titian forged by some power outside his will. Like his Connecticut Yankee as led to reflect upon heredity, "a procession of ancestors that stretches a billion years to the Adam-clam or grasshopper or monkey from whom ace has been so tediously and ostentatiously and unprofitably developed."
Main Part
1.2 Early life of Mark Twain
I am persuaded," wrote Bernard Shaw about Mark Twain, "that the future historian of America will find your works indispensable to him as a French historian finds the political tracts of tare." By his own participation, no artist in our literature save Lincoln is so broad a segment of typical American experience in the last century, Langhorne Clemens, known by the most famous pen name that an American ever bore, is a matchless annalist of his times. His life makes those Carry men in Boston and Concord and New York resemble the flowering of talents that blossomed in too retired a k. He knew the greatest river of the continent as Melville knew the high. He witnessed the epic of America, the westward tide at its full, with option keener than the shallow appraisals of Bret Harte and Joaquin. When in his Autobiography Mark Twain recalls after forty years the faddy of an emigrant lad stabbed to death by a drunken comrade, and adds, the red life gush from his breast," we are reminded of Whitman's nation, "I was there"—with the difference that Walt's immediacy was genitive, Mark's actual. In the activities of the external man as well as in actor and temperament, Mark Twain was a representative American— idyllic ante-bellum boyhood in a river town, to maturity enmeshed in Toss-purposes of the Gilded Age which he christened, and thence to the years of mingled hope and disillusion in the Progressive Era. Despite »we avowal, "There is not a single human characteristic which can be f labeled as 'American,' " Mark Twain is stamped unforgettably with the brand. If he failed finally to reconcile reality and ideality, he abs and gave expression to both. That failure was not his; it belonged to penetration.
age his incurably Calvinist mind saw all the events of his life, from son November 30, 1835, in the village of Florida, Missouri, as a chain of titian forged by some power outside his will. Like his Connecticut Yankee as led to reflect upon heredity, "a procession of ancestors that stretches a billion years to the Adam-clam or grasshopper or monkey from whom ace has been so tediously and ostentatiously and unprofitably developed."
His father, an austere restless Virginian, bequeathed the family a vain hone of fortune from "the Tennessee lands," like Squire Hawkins in The Gilded Age; he also gave his son an object lesson in failure like the example set the father of a genius whom Mark the Baronial once rose to challenge Shakespeare of Stratford. The wife and mother, Jane Lampton Clernens of Kentucky pioneer stock, sought by her strong Presbyterianism to balance her husband's village-lawyer agnosticism; their famous son inherited the self-tormenting conscience with the latter's will to disbelieve. As for derivations more remote Twain the romantic relished his maternal tie with the Earls of Durham through "the American claimant," while Twain the democrat reserved his sole ancestral pride for a Regicide judge, who "did what he could toward reducing the list of crowned shams of his day."
In 1839 the Clemens’s moved to Hannibal, on the west bank of the Mississippi, and set the conditions of boyhood and youth from which flowed the wellspring of Mark Twain's clearest inspiration. Thanks to Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, its aspect in the forties has become the property of millions: the wharf giving upon the turbid waters where rafts and broad-horns, fast packets and gay showboats passed endlessly, the plank sidewalks where Tom and Becky trudged to school, the tanyard where Huck's drunken father slept among the hogs, the steep slope of Cardiff (really Holliday's) Hill, the surrounding woods of oak and hickory and sumach, and a few miles downstream the cave where Injun Joe met death. Hannibal lay in its halcyon summer between frontier days and the convulsions of the Civil War, the latter forecast in the mobbing of an occasional abolitionist and the tracking down of runaway slaves. On the whole, happiness outweighed grief; prized in retrospect was the large freedom of a boy's life, with the swimming hole and woods full of game, jolly playmates banded against a world of adult supremacy, and dinner tables groaning with prodigal hospitality. "It was a heavenly place for a boy," Hannibal's first citizen remembered.
Sam Clemens' schooling ended early, when he was about twelve. After his father's death the lad was apprenticed to a printer's shop—"the poor boys college," Lincoln called it. Lack of formal education doubtless gave the later Mark Twain an eagerness to have his genius certified by convention, and also led him occasionally to discover shopworn ideas with a thrill impossible to sophisticates; but it also delivered him from those cultural stereotypes into which the genius of New England, for example, for generations had been poured. Fatalist that he was, Twain liked to date his career from certain accidents. The first of them came one day on the streets of Hannibal, when the young printer picked up a stray leaf from a book about Joan of Arc, an for the first time saw magic in the printed word. Henceforth the itch scribbling was strong upon him. His earliest known appearance in print, crudely humorous sketch called "The Dandy Frightening the Squatter," appeared in the Boston Carpet Bag of May i, 1852. He left Hannibal the next year, wandering on to New York and Philadelphia, and began to send hometown papers the first of those facetious travel pieces which he wrote sporadically for the next half-century. In 1857, after tarrying awhile in Cincinnati, Jie set out for New Orleans with a notion of shipping for the Amazon. But, lacking funds, he became a steamboat pilot under the tutelage of Horace Bixby. That veteran gradually taught him the ever changing aspects of the Mississippi, by sun and starlight, at low water and in flood.