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Achilles and the Tortoise: Mark Twain's Fictions by Clark Griffith Hardcover
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“Book looks great, aside from some ghosting/indentions from where the previous owner's name was ”... Read moreabout condition
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Located in: Waco, Texas, United States
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Estimated between Fri, May 31 and Wed, Jun 5 to 43230
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eBay item number:125854930758
Item specifics
- Condition
- Very Good
- Seller Notes
- Subject Area
- Mark Twain, Humor
- Book Title
- ACHILLES AND THE TORTOISE: MARK TWAIN'S FICTIONS
- Personalized
- No
- Features
- 1st Edition
- Country/Region of Manufacture
- United States
- Subject
- Literature
- ISBN
- 9780817310394
- Publication Year
- 2000
- Type
- Textbook
- Format
- Trade Paperback
- Language
- English
- Publication Name
- Achilles and the Tortoise : Mark Twain's Fictions
- Item Height
- 0.9in
- Item Length
- 9in
- Publisher
- University of Alabama Press
- Item Width
- 6in
- Item Weight
- 0 Oz
- Number of Pages
- 296 Pages
About this product
Product Information
Covering the entire body of Mark Twain's fiction, Clark Griffith in Achilles and the Tortoise answers two questions: How did Mark Twain write? And why is he funny? Griffith defines and demonstrates Mark Twain's poetics and, in doing so, reveals Twain's ability to create and sustain human laughter. Through a close reading of the fictions-short and long, early and late-Griffith contends that Mark Twain's strength lay not in comedy or in satire or (as the 19th century understood the term) even in the practice of humor. Rather his genius lay in the joke, specifically the "sick joke." For all his finesse and seeming variety, Twain tells the same joke, with its single cast of doomed and damned characters, its single dead-end conclusion, over and over endlessly. As he attempted to attain the comic resolution and comically transfigured characters he yearned for, Twain forever played, for Griffith, the role of the Achilles of Zeno's Paradox. Like the tortoise that Achilles cannot overtake in Zeno's tale, the richness of comic life forever remained outside Twain's grasp. The last third of Griffith's study draws parallels between Mark Twain and Herman Melville. Although the two authors never met and seem not to have read each other's works, they labored under the sense of what, in Moby-Dick, Ishmael calls "a vast practical joke . . . at nobody's expense but one's] own." The laughter occasioned by this cosmic conspiracy shapes the career of Huckleberry Finn fully as much as it does Ishmael's voyage. Out of the laughter are generated the respective obsessions of Captain Ahab and Bartleby, of Pudd'nhead Wilson and Hadleyburg. Reduced at last to a dry mock, the laughter is the prevailing tone of both Billy Budd and The Mysterious Stranger Manuscripts.
Product Identifiers
Publisher
University of Alabama Press
ISBN-10
0817310398
ISBN-13
9780817310394
eBay Product ID (ePID)
1648173
Product Key Features
Publication Name
Achilles and the Tortoise : Mark Twain's Fictions
Format
Trade Paperback
Language
English
Publication Year
2000
Type
Textbook
Number of Pages
296 Pages
Dimensions
Item Length
9in
Item Height
0.9in
Item Width
6in
Item Weight
0 Oz
Additional Product Features
Edition Number
2
Reviews
"Clark Griffith's Achilles and the Tortoise is effortlessly witty yet built upon long cogitation with meticulous carpentry, fitting and refitting together the intricate sections of his argument. It is quite deliberately individualistic and polemical yet draws upon awesomely wide reading to support its judgments. With deceptive simplicity yet, eventually, multilayered sophistication it keeps asking: Why is Mark Twain 'funny'? It culminates with a dazzling analysis of all three of the Mysterious Stranger fables, but the entire book conducts a challenging, original, and bracing experience." -Louis Budd, Duke University
Copyright Date
2000
Topic
General, American / General
Dewey Decimal
818/.409
Intended Audience
Scholarly & Professional
Dewey Edition
21
Genre
Literary Criticism
Item description from the seller
Seller assumes all responsibility for this listing.
eBay item number:125854930758
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Item location:
Waco, Texas, United States
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| US $4.87 | United States | Economy Shipping (USPS Media MailTM) | Estimated between Fri, May 31 and Wed, Jun 5 to 43230 |
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