“The Pleasures of the Text”: Mark Twain’s Following the Equator

Mark Twain’s two-volume Following the Equator 1897 is a fascinating travelogue, displaying all the characteristic touches of the author: keen powers of observation, ironic commentary, scathing wit, and a vividly evocative narrative style. The second volume, which relates Twain’s trip to India, achieves moreover a fine balancing act: there is in it both a colonial discourse and its simultaneously oppositional subtext.

PDF

___

Barthes, Roland. The Rustle of Language. Trans. Richard Howard. London: Basil Blackwell, 1986.
Barthes, Roland. Pleasure of the Text. Trans. Richard Miller. New York: Noonday, 1988.
Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. 1961. Trans. Constance Parrington. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977.
Galligan, Edward L. The Comic Vision in Literature. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1984.
Iser, Wolfgang. “Representation: A Performative Act.” The Aims of Representation: Subject/Text/History. Ed. Murray Krieger. New York: Columbia University Press, 1987. 217-232.
Jones, William. The Works. 13 volumes. 1807. New Delhi Agam Prakasham, 1980.
Kinglake, Alexander. Eothen: Traces Of Travel Brought Home From The East. 1844. London: Picador, 1995.
Kipling, Rudyard. Kim. 1901. London: Macmillan, 1965.
Mill, James. The History of British India. 3 volumes. 1817. New Delhi: Associated Publishing House, 1978.
Morris, Jan [then James]. Pax Brittanica: The Climax of an Empire. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984.
Said, Edward. Orientalism. 1978. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990.
Said, Edward. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Knopf, 1993.
Sewell, David R. Mark Twain’s Languages: Discourse, Dialogue and Linguistic Variety. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987.
Steen, Gerard. Understanding Metaphor in Literature: An Empirical Approach. London: Longman, 1994.
Twain, Mark. Following the Equator. 1897. Vol. II. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1904.
Twain, Mark. The Autobiography of Mark Twain. 1906-1907. Ed. Charles Nerder. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1959.