Achilles and the Tortoise

Defines and demonstrates Mark Twain's poetics and, in doing so, reveals Twain's ability to create and sustain human laughter Through a close reading of the fictions–short and long, early and late–Griffith contends that Mark Twain's strength lay not in comedy or in satire or (as the 19th century understood the term) even in the practice of humor. Rather his genius lay in the joke, specifically the "sick joke." For all his finesse and seeming variety, Twain tells the same joke, with its single cas