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Author: Mark Twain
Merchant: ChristianBook
Manufacturer: Signet Classics
ISBN: 0451530497
Price: $6.35
($3.50 S&H + 5.0% tax in MA)
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Description
One of the most famous travel books ever written about Europe and the Holy Land by an American, The Innocents Abroad is Mark Twain's irreverent and incisive commentary on the 'New Barbarians' encounter with the 'Old World'. Twain's hilarious satire is a double-edged weapon, impaling with sharp wit the chauvinist and the cosmopolitan alike. His naive Westerner is a blustering pretender to sophistication, a too-quick convert to culture. Turning the coin, the ruins of antiquity appear but a shadow of their heralded glory; the scenery of Europe and the Holy Land dwarfs in contrast to the splendor of a Western landscape. With stunning agility Twain unconsciously uses his travelogue - as Leslie A. Fiedler points out - to search out the 'archetypal differences' between Americans and Europeans - the 'American identity'. As Mr. Fiedler points out in his pungent Afterword, this was a quest that was to obsess Mark Twain's literary career.
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