Blackwell Reference Online

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On the highly civilized man there rests at all times a three-fold burden-the past, the present, and the future! the barbarian carries through life but one burden-that of the present; and in a psychological view, a very light one indeed; the civilized man is ever thinking of the past-representing, repeating, recasting, and projecting the experience of bygone days to days that are to come.(George Miller Beard, American Nervousness: Its Causes and Consequences)A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889) represents Mark Twain's most serious and sustained attempt to think about history. Through its time-travel plot, which involves the “transposition” of its hero from his native nineteenth-century Connecticut to sixth-century England (Twain 1889: 18), the novel brings together two otherwise disparate historic periods (one of which, of course, is Twain's own present) in order to measure them against one another, and, in the process, find one or the other wanting. Predictably enough, the results of this exercise tend, on the face of things at least, to overwhelmingly affirm the superiority of the late nineteenth century over its premodern adversary. However, as the novel's most perceptive critics have often noted, there is a deeper level at which this outcome is subverted – not only because the nineteenth century turns out to share all too many of the sixth century's deficiencies, ... log in or subscribe to read full text