Mark Twain

Book excerpt: This book provides an overview of Mark Twain's work and a close critical analysis of the forms and themes of his major texts. The author uses recent cultural and literary theory to re-examine Twain's travel writing and fiction, writing in a jargon-free and accessible manner. He focuses on Twain's humour and his attitudes to such subjects as boyhood, nationality, race relations, technology, and capitalist expansion, and shows how his work reflects anxieties both about changes in the social and industrial order in post Civil-War America and the status of the individual within it.