Mark Twain and the Art of the Tall Tale
Format:Hardback
Publisher:Oxford University Press Inc
Published:24th Jun '93
Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back
Mark Twain and the Art of the Tall Tale is a study of a peculiarly American comic strategy and its role in Mark Twain's fiction. Henry Wonham examines how Mark Twain used the oral genre of the tall tale to experiment with narrative structure throughout his career. Wonham argues that in his major fiction Twain manipulated conventional approaches to reading and writing by engaging his audience in a series of rhetorical games, whose rules he adapted from the conventions of tall tale performance and response. The book offers a history of the tall tale in American oral and written language, and shows how Twain's appropriation of the genre developed from the early works such as The Innocents Abroad through Tom Sawyer, Huck Finn, and Pudd'nhead Wilson.
`fascinating book ... Wonham's analysis unties knots in Mark Twain's rhetoric. Beyond that, it suggests fascinating lines of investigation into American identity.' Stephen Fender, Times Literary Supplement
he has moved beyond previous scholarship in his conceptualisations of the epistemological problematic and of the rhetorical situation of yarn spinning as well as in his interesting analysis of the tall tale's metamorphosis from oral tradition to an indigenous literay form...an innovative understanding of the rall tale and a reinterpretation of the entire Mark Twain cannon. * American Studies *
Wonham's investigation is fruitful ... since it shifts the focus from a folklorist perspective to the communicative process to the communicative process, examining the roots of the genre's idiosyncratic relationship between truth and lie, fact and fiction, reality and fantasy. The study profits from its specialized focus and, as good ones do, thus triggers a host of new questions. Like any good study, Wonham's book raises crucial questions and deserves particular credit for elaborating the complexity of tall-talking. * Gerd Hurm, Kritikon Litterarum 23 (1996) *
ISBN: 9780195078015
Dimensions: 217mm x 145mm x 23mm
Weight: 395g
224 pages