Directory
References
Discover
The Ordeal of Mark Twain
work by Brooks
Learn about this topic in these articles:
discussed in biography
- In Van Wyck Brooks
Brooks’s book The Ordeal of Mark Twain (1920; rev. ed., 1933) was a psychological study attempting to show that Twain had crippled himself emotionally and curtailed his genius by repressing his natural artistic bent for the sake of his Calvinist upbringing. In The Pilgrimage of Henry James…
Read More
Freudian criticism
- In Freudian criticism
…biography in works such as The Ordeal of Mark Twain (1920). Professional analysts have applied their techniques to literature, notably Ernest Jones in Hamlet and Oedipus (1910 and 1949), which traces the famous problem of Hamlet’s irresolution back to William Shakespeare’s own Oedipal guilt.
Read More