M.A.Thesis对马克·吐温的两部《历险记》的福柯式解读M.A.Thesiss Foucault interpretation of the adventures of Mark Twains two Adventures.pdfVIP

Shanghai Jiao Tong University M.A. Thesis Chapter One Introduction 1.1 Mark Twain’s Life and Works The humorist, journalist, travel writer, novelist, and short story writer who is best known by his pseudonym Mark Twain was born Samuel Langhorne Clemens in Florida, Missouri, in 1835. At the age of four he moved with his family to the Mississippi River town of Hannibal. His childhood experiences in Hannibal, then, are woven into romantic tales that memorialize a particular place in America at a particular time in history. The very best of Twain’s fiction, such as The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,1 Pudd’nhead Wilson, and a series of other lesser-known texts are imaginatively located around that town. When he was only eleven, Twain’s father died and he had to begin working to support the family. Thereafter, he traveled throughout the East and Midwest as a journeyman printer. After four years’ wandering, he became a licensed and highly paid pilot on the Mississippi River, which provides sufficient materials for his autobiography Life on the Mississippi , and two imaginative prose pieces: “River Intelligence”, a letter attacking a self-important older pilot; and a spoof on the memoranda that pilots wrote for their colleagues, a satirical piece that appeared in the Missouri Republican in August 1860. Afterwards, due to the Civil War in 1861, which virtually stopped all commercial river traffic, Twain left the Mississippi River and pursued a succession of careers as a Confederate soldier, a gold prospector, a silver miner, a newspaper rep