"You know about transmigration of souls; do you know about transposition of epochs—and bodies?"
So Hank Morgan, mechanic and factory supervisor from Hartford, Connecticut, introduces his strange history, which begins when he wakes up to find himself in sixth-century England. And so Mark Twain introduces us to the results—satiric, satanic, anguished and anarchic—of an imaginary confrontation between the new, nineteenth-century America and Olde England.
Rich comedy and extravagant romance permeate the narrative, but these are undercut by a darkness and a depth of seriousness which give the work an ambivalence—the product of Twain's own divided attitude. A benign fantasy becomes an apocalyptic vision of terrifying violence and destruction. A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur's Court is a superbly entertaining novel. It is also a profoundly disturbing one.
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