《馬克·吐溫》劍橋文學名家研習繫列。馬克·吐溫膾炙人口的作品作了既深刻又通俗的解讀，其中包括《湯姆·索亞歷險記》和《哈克貝裡·費恩歷險記》。作者傾力向讀者展示吐溫式幽默，著重說明這種幽默的效果是如何產生的以及這種獨特的幽默手法是如何成功烘托吐溫的小說風格的。《馬克·吐溫》對初次接觸吐溫的讀者非常有價值。
馬克·吐溫膾炙人口的作品作了既深刻又通俗的解讀，其中包括《湯姆·索亞歷險記》和《哈克貝裡·費恩歷險記》。作者傾力向讀者展示吐溫式幽默，著重說明這種幽默的效果是如何產生的以及這種獨特的幽默手法是如何成功烘托吐溫的小說風格的。《馬克·吐溫》對初次接觸吐溫的讀者非常有價值。

Preface
Note on referencing

1 Mark Twain's life
The early life
River boating, the Civil War, the West
Early success, marriage, the Hartford years
Expatriation, financial loss, family tragedy
The final years

2 Contexts
Samuel Langhorne Clemens and 'Mark Twain'

3 Works
Twain's humour
Travel and travel writing: Innocents Abroad,
A Tramp Abroad, Roughing It, Life on the
Mississippi
Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn
A Connecticut Yankee and Pudd'nhead Wilson

4 Critical reception and the late works
Notes
Guide to further reading
Index

Despite his reputation as one of the most 'American' of writers, Twain is a key figure in any account of the cultural connections and exchanges across national and international borders in his period. If his humour first came out of the American frontier, it proved immediately popular with a British audience. When Twain first visited England in August 1872, he was widely f~~ted, and found himself already well-known: 'a lion', 'by long odds the most widely known & popular American author among the English' (L5, 184, 197). Very much at home there, he wrote home to wife Olivia: 'Too much company- too much dining - too much sociability. (But I would rather live in England than America -which is treason.)' (L5, 155). He made his visit in the first place in part to gather material for a book provisionally titled Upon the Oddities and Eccentricities of the English. But the genuine warmth of his reception in the country helped persuade him to abandon this project. And by the end of 1873 he had visited England three times, thoroughly enjoying his reputation there as author, lecturer and wit.
Indeed, it would seem that the British public recognised Twain's exceptional comic talents and gave him celebrity status, more quickly than his native audi- ence. Albert Bigelow Paine, his biographer, spoke of him being treated as 'little less than royalty' (LS, 372) on his second English visit in May-October 1873. Twain quickly followed this up with a third trip (November 1873-January 1874) to deliver a further series of lectures. After photographs were taken of him, apparently to go on sale to the general public, he wrote to Olivia that: 'it seems as if3 out of every 5 1 meet on the street recognize me. This in London! It seems incredible' (L5, 532). What is noteworthy here is just how appreciative a nineteenth-century British audience was of a form of humour that one might assume was culturally alien to it. Contemporary British reports of Twain's new lecture on 'Roughing It on the Silver Frontier' spoke of the audience's initial ignorance of the 'locality to which he intended to introduce them' ('Mexico was generally suggested'). But they nonetheless described both the success of Twain's comic material and his distinctive way of delivering it. As Moncure Daniel Conway wrote (around the turn of 1873-4): 'The talk of literary London just now is Mark Twain's account, in his new lecture of the "bucking" horse which he purchased in Nevada.
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