The Meaning of A Connecticut Yankee

Bibliographic Data

ID3761041
AuthorsEverett Carter (corresponding author)
Year1978
Volume50
Issue3
Pages418
Publication date1978-11-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueAmerican Literature (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0002-9831 • E-ISSN: 1527-2117
PublisherJSTOR (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.2307/2925136
OpenAlexW2315268350
LanguageEN
Citations received3

I NTERPRETATIONS of Mark Twain's fiction about knight errantry, iA Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, have changed with successive generations of American commentators. Like the Spanish readers of Don Quixote, American readers of A Connecticut Yankee have divided into hard critics who have seen the book as an attack on sentimentalism about the past, and, increasing in number, those soft critics who have read it as either ambivalent or as an attack on technology and the American faith in material progress. The terms hard and soft are those of a scholar commenting upon the division between schools of commentaries on Don Quixote, the hard critics of Cervantes' masterpiece insisting upon its defense of reality, the soft critics interpreting the work as a defense of the dauntless power of the imagination to remake reality nearer to the dream.2 The new soft reading of Don Quixote has been essential to interpretations of Spanish culture; Unamuno, the first of the soft critics of our century, suggested that Don Quixote, rejecting the miserable real for the hopeless dream, is the symbol of what is good, holy, and tragic in the Spanish soul. The fact that one modern American commentator3 has suggested that the Yankee's enemy, Merlin, plays a similar role in Mark Twain's romance is an index of how far criti

Art · Art history · Epistemology · Meaning (existential) · Psychoanalysis · Yankee · American and British Literature Analysis · American Literature and Humor Studies · History · Literature, Film, and Journalism Analysis · Philosophy · Psychology

Tools

Open DOISci-Hub