导语

  

   In Pudd'nhead Wilson (1894), Mark Twain looked back to the same antebellum Southern life he had recorded in Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. What he found there, however, could not be reconciled with the life he had previously memorialized. Confronted by violent white Southern backlash against African Americans and the wild economic disparities and swift changes of the  Gilded Age, Twain produced a famously fractured and fantastic novel. Switched babies, white-skinned "black" slaves, a man dressed as a woman, a woman dressed as a man, masters who are slaves and slaves who become mastdrs, a son who sells his own mother down the river, a mother who has given her son an entirely differentidentity (and can take it away), with a pair of dispossessed twin Italian counts thrown in for good measure--the world of Pudd'nhead W/lson is a world of reversals, disguises, and duplicity.

内容提要

  

   In Pudd"nhead Wilson (1894), Mark Twain looked back to the same antebellum Southern life he had recorded in Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. What he found there, however, could not be reconciled with the life he had previously memorialized. Confronted by violent white Southern backlash against African Americans and the wild economic disparities and swift changes of the  Gilded Age, Twain produced a famously fractured and fantastic novel. Switched babies, white-skinned "black" slaves, a man dressed as a woman, a woman dressed as a man, masters who are slaves and slaves who become mastdrs, a son who sells his own mother down the river, a mother who has given her son an entirely differentidentity (and can take it away), with a pair of dispossessed twin Italian counts thrown in for good measure--the world of Pudd"nhead W/lson is a world of reversals, disguises, and duplicity.

INTRODUCTION
CHRONOLOGY OF MARK TWAm"S
   LIFE AND WORK
HISTORICAL CONTEXT OF Pudd"nhead Wilson

             PUDD"NHEAD WILSON
A WHISPER TO THE REAER
   X. PUDD"NHEAD WINS HIS NAME
   II. DRISCOLL SPARES HIS SLAVES
  Ill. RoxY PLAYS A SHREWD TRICK
   IV. THE WAYS OF THE CHANGELINGS
    V. THE TWINS THRILL DAWSON"S LANDING
   VI. SWIMMING IN GLORY
  VII. THE UNKNOWN NYMPH
VIII.  MARSE TOM TRAMPLES His CHANCE
   LX. TOM PRACTICES SYCOPHANCY
   X.  THE NYMPH REVEALED
  XL   PUDD"NHEAD"S STARTLING DISCOVERY
XII. THE SHAME OF JUDGE DRISCOLL
XIII. TOM STARES AT RUIN
XIV. ROXANA INSISTS UPON RPORM
  XV. THE ROBBER ROBBED
XVI. SOLD DOWN THE RIVER
XVII. THE JUDGE UTTERS DIRE PROPHECY
XVIII. ROXANA COMMANDS
XIX. THE PROPHECY REALIZED
  XX. THE MURDERER CHUCKLES
XXI. DOOM

        CONCLUSION
        NOTES
        INTERPRETIVE NOTES
        CRTICAL EXCERPTS
        QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION
        SUGGESTIONS FOR THE INTERESTED READER