Illustration and Imagination: Mark Twain’s Roughing It and John Gast’s American Progress
Mostly set in the American West between 1861 and 1866, Roughing It (1872) is centered on the transformation of Twain’s persona from a greenhorn into a writer and a lecturer. His imagination was driven by mental images that owed a lot to folklore and were conveyed by mainstream iconography and discou...
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| הוצא לאור ב: | URI:https://journals.openedition.org/ilcea, |
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| מחבר ראשי: | |
| פורמט: | Article ou chapitre numérique |
| שפה: | Anglais |
| יצא לאור: |
ILCEA
2021
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| נושאים: | |
| גישה מקוונת: | Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM |
| סיכום: | Mostly set in the American West between 1861 and 1866, Roughing It (1872) is centered on the transformation of Twain’s persona from a greenhorn into a writer and a lecturer. His imagination was driven by mental images that owed a lot to folklore and were conveyed by mainstream iconography and discourse.Roughing It was published the year when John Gast completed American Progress, also often called “Manifest Destiny”. The image was to become a prominent visual and ideological tool for the promotion of westward advance.As was the case with other travel books of the period, Roughing It was lavishly adorned; three hundred and four illustrations contributed to its aesthetics and its ideology. The similarities between the frontispiece, “Innocent Dreams” and American Progress suggest common values between national destiny and individual ambition.This paper starts with a comparative study of American Progress, the original frontispiece of Roughing It and “Innocent Dreams” to delineate the ideological specificity of Twain’s vision. Still relying on the text and its illustrations, it then establishes that Twain’s West is greatly an aesthetic and introspective construct. |
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