內容簡介
美國文學經典之跨越時空小說!漢克‧摩根某日睡醒,發現自己從十九世紀的美國穿越時空到六世紀的英國,當時英國是亞瑟王和圓桌武士的天下,摩根靠著領先十幾世紀的知識,很快地取得亞瑟王的信任。
摩根在成為亞瑟王執政的左右手之後,野心勃勃地想將十九世紀的烏托邦帶到六世紀的英國,但卻因為忽略了當時社會地特性和教會的勢力等等因素,終究烏托邦的理想幻滅無法成真。
馬克‧吐溫是十九世紀知名的美國作家,甚至有美國文學之父的美稱,最知名的作品有《湯姆歷險記》、《頑童流浪記》,馬克‧吐溫以其特有的幽默著稱,身為批判現實主義的佼佼者,在故事中諷刺美國夢「天下無難事」的想法也會常到苦頭,而政府的權力沒有限制的情況下,反而會造成社會亂象。
本書於一八八九年出版,普遍被認為是馬克‧吐溫的最佳作品之一,因其內容的涵義,但現代都還是非常重要及受歡迎的一本小說。
Hank Morgan awakens one morning to find he has been transported from nineteenth-century New England to sixth-century England and the reign of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. Morgan brings to King Arthur’s utopian court the ingenuity of the future, resulting in a culture clash that is at once satiric, anarchic, and darkly comic.
Critically deemed one of Twain’s finest and most caustic works, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court is both a delightfully entertaining story and a disturbing analysis of the efficacy of government, the benefits of progress, and the dissolution of social mores. It remains as powerful a work of fiction today as it was upon its first publication in 1889.
作者介紹
Mark TwainMark Twain was born Samuel Langhorne Clemens on November 30, 1835, in Florida, Missouri; his family moved to the port town of Hannibal four years later. His father, an unsuccessful farmer, died when Twain was eleven. Soon afterward the boy began working as an apprentice printer, and by age sixteen he was writing newspaper sketches. He left Hannibal at eighteen to work as an itinerant printer in New York, Philadelphia, St. Louis, and Cincinnati. From 1857 to 1861 he worked on Mississippi steamboats, advancing from cub pilot to licensed pilot.
After river shipping was interrupted by the Civil War, Twain headed west with his brother Orion, who had been appointed secretary to the Nevada Territory. Settling in Carson City, he tried his luck at prospecting and wrote humorous pieces for a range of newspapers. Around this time he first began using the pseudonym Mark Twain, derived from a riverboat term. Relocating to San Francisco, he became a regular newspaper correspondent and a contributor to the literary magazine the Golden Era. He made a five-month journey to Hawaii in 1866 and the following year traveled to Europe to report on the first organized tourist cruise. The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County and Other Sketches (1867) consolidated his growing reputation as humorist and lecturer.
After his marriage to Livy Langdon, Twain settled first in Buffalo, New York, and then for two decades in Hartfort, Connecticut. His European sketches were expanded into The Innocents Abroad (1869), followed by Roughing It (1872), an account of his Western adventures; both were enormously successful. Twain's literary triumphs were offset by often ill-advised business dealings (he sank thousands of dollars, for instance, in a failed attempt to develop a new kind of typesetting machine, and thousands more into his own ultimately unsuccessful publishing house) and unrestrained spending that left him in frequent financial difficulty, a pattern that was to persist throughout his life.