This anthology ,consisting of commissioned essays as well as those published in 1980s and after offers a revaluation of Mark Twain’s art and his canonical criticism. The essays, contributed by distinguished international scholars, reflects upon Twain’s ambivalent personality, his fictional characters and technique, his humour and pathos, his political stance and celebration of America, his comments on the nature of man and, finally, his sense of life. The range of the discourse extends from the Puritanic legacy of Twain’s humour, through a re-examination of his style and ideology (couched in Bakhtinian “dialogism” and “carnivalization”), to new lights on specific texts. More than most contributors to this volume have addressed themselves to the complex and often unresolvable issues which compelled Mark Twain’s focused attention all along his life, such as freedom, openness, logic of closure, self-reflexivity, moral dilemmas and historicity. The scrutiny of these vital concerns is searching and thorough even as the findings, now and then, stay open- ended.

Praulla C. Kar was Chair, Department of English at M.S. University of Baroda. He studied at Utkal, Bridgeport and the University of Utah. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Utah in 1973 on his thesis, “Saul Bellow and the Defence of the Self.” He has taught at Utkal University, Bhubaneswar and was Deputy Director at American Studies Research Centre, Hyderabad during 1982-86. He was a Fulbright post-doctoral fellow at the Universities of Chicago, Texas at Austin and California at Berkeley. He was a Fellow at the School of Criticism and Theory at Dartmouth College, New Hampshire in 1986. He has edited an anthology of criticism on American literature and another on Critical Theory.