Mark Twain's Satire

MINISTRY OF HIGHER AND SECONDARY SPECIALISED EDUCATION OF THE REPUBLIC OF UZBEKISTAN

GULISTAN STATE UNIVERSITY

The English and Literature department

Kan Anna’s qualification work on speciality 5220100, English philology on theme:

Mark Twain’s Satire

Supervisor: Tojiev Kh.

Gulistan-2006

Contents

I. Introduction

1.1. General characteristics of the work

2.1. Some words about Mark Twain

II. Main part

1.2.Early life of Mark Twain

2.2. Beginning of literary career, Twain’s first successful experiences

3.2. Marriage and wife’s influence on Mark Twain’s literary works

4.2. “The Guilded Age” as the first significant work

5.2. Critical analysis of “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

6.2. “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” as the most significant work

7.2. Later years of Mark Twain

8.2. Simpletons abroad (American literature abroad)

III. Conclusion

1.3. Afterwards to Mark Twain’s literary significance

IV Bibliography

Introduction

1.1 General characteristics of the work

The theme of our qualification work sounds as following: “Mark Twain and his Satire” The brief characteristics of our work can be seen from the following features:

The topicality of this work causes several important points. We dare to say that Mark Twain always remains topical for us because his works, even written more than a century ago his immortal humor, tell about the modern things and phenomena which happen in our lives, such as humans’ qualities, the problems of friendship, support, greed, populism, childhood, love, revenge, etc. And our work becomes much more topical because of the reason that Mark Twain is still one of the most popular American writers read by readers. We are sure that there is hardly a man in our country can be found, who has never heard of adventures of Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, The Prince and the Pauper, Yankee from Connecticut, etc. We are also convincer that every intellectual learner of English has these works as hand-books for themselves. So the significance of our work can be proved by the following reasons:

a) Mark Twain for the American literature is of the same value as Chekhov for the Russians, Navoi for the Uzbeks, Gachec for the Checks, etc.

b) Though written about his times, humoristic works of Twain reflect the real state of affairs happened in our modern life, and even such scenes might happen with the readers of our qualification work.

c) Twain’s books are also worth studying for their brilliant humour, metaphoric language, ideas and dialogues within the works.

Having based upon the topicality of the theme we are able to formulate the general purposes of our qualification work.

a) To study, analyze, and sum up the humour- essence of Twain’s works.

b) To analyze humoristic works of the writer.

c) To prove the idea of modernity in Shakespeare’s “Midsummer Night”.

c) To mention and compare between themselves the critical opinions concerning to the play.

d) To take time parallels between Twain’s times and reality of nowadays.

e) To study Mark Twain’s heritage and greatness and significance on the base of his works “Huckleberry Finn”, “Tom Sawyer”, “Yankee from Connecticut”, “The Prince and the Pauper”.

If we say about the new information used within our work we may note that the work studies the problem from the modern positions and analyzes the modern trends appeared in this subject for the last ten years. For instance, the novelty concludes in a wide collecting of Internet materials dealing with Mark Twain’s heritage.

The practical significance of the work concludes in the following items:

a) The work could serve as a good source of materials for additional reading by students at schools, colleges and lyceums.

b) The problem of difficult understanding stylistic devices could be a little bit easier,

c) Those who would like to possess a perfect knowledge of English will find our work useful and practical.

d) Our qualification work is recognition of greatness of our outstanding American writer.

Having said about the scholars who dealt with the same theme earlier we may mention B.Shaw, A.Anikst, A.Paine, Dr.Jonson, Alfred Bates and many others.

We used in our work scientific approaches methods of general analysis.

The novelty of the work is concluded in including the modern interpretations of the Twain’s heritage.

Compositional structure of my work consists of four major parts – Introduction, Main part, Conclusion, and Bibliography. The brief content of each part is to be presented for your attention.

We subdivided the introductory material into two sections.. The first section gives some brief characteristics of the work, its aims and goals, problems and methods of investigation. The second item reveals common biographic milestones of Mark Twain, which were significant for the subject matter of our theme. The main part bears eight items in itself. Each items reveal the concrete problem. In the first paragraph we reflected the early years of Mark Twain’s life, precisely his young years, when Twain worked on the Mississippi, and the experiences of which were later reflected in all the works of satirist. The second item demonstrates the analysis of satirical works and his novel “Simpletons Abroad”. In the third paragraph of the main part we took into consideration the problem of the influence of wife onto the work of Twain. The fourth item tells us about the satiric novel “The Guilded Age”, - second serious work of Twain. The next two paragraphs of the main part take into consideration Mark Twain’s the most famous and magnificent works , in which his satirical talent appeared most greatly, - “Tom Sawyer” and “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” .The seventh item tells about the later years of Mark Twain, which were characterized by the crisis of his creative activity, upsetting the reality of life, and sharpening of social contradictions. The last paragraph tells about the history of the American literary invasion in Europe owing to appearance of Twain’s works. In the Conclusion work we gave some notes concerning the literary significance of Twain’s works, their novelty and actuality for modern readers. The qualification work contains to the bibliography , which mentions the list of literature used in the frame of our work.