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A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court is an 1889 novel by American humorist and writer Mark Twain. The work is a very early example of time travel in literature.
Plot summary The novel tells the tale of Hank Morgan, a 19th-century citizen of Hartford, Connecticut who awakens to find himself mysteriously transported back in time to early medieval England at the time of the legendary King Arthur in AD 528. Hank uses his modern technological knowledge and Yankee ingenuity to advance the superstitious, brutal and ignorant old English society and secure a high position for himself, but later falls victim to modern society's own darker side. With its anachronistic technology, such as the telegraph, bicycle, etc., the book has a claim to being the first steampunk tale. It is also recognized as one of the first time travel stories ever written. While parts of the book poke fun at contemporary society, the main thrust is a satire of romanticized ideas of chivalry and of the idealization of the Middle Ages such as was common in 19th-century literature, most notably perhaps in the novels of Sir Walter Scott, for whom Twain had a particular dislike, blaming his romanticization of battle for the South's decision to fight the Civil War. For example, the book portrays the medieval English as being very gullible, as when Merlin makes a "veil of invisibility" that actually does not exist. When the veil is worn, people act as if they did not see the wearer, even though he is in plain view. Film, TV or theatrical adaptations This famous story has been adapted to stage, feature-length motion pictures, and animated cartoons numerous times since the beginning of the 20th century. It was made into the 1929 musical A Connecticut Yankee by Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart. In 1931, it was made into a film, A Connecticut Yankee, starring Will Rogers. In 1949 it was reworked into a film starring Bing Crosby and Rhonda Fleming, this time with music composed by James Van Heusen and Victor Young. It has also inspired many variations and parodies. One of many is the 1995 Walt Disney Studios adaptation of the book into a feature film under the name A Kid in King Arthur's Court. As the title suggests, the protagonist of the Disney film is considerably younger than Twain's original character. Creation of a SF sub-genre Twain's book could be considered to have (unintentionally) founded an entire sub-genre of Science Fiction, characterized by the depiction of a modern time traveller arriving at an ancient society, anachronistically introducing modern technologies and institutions and completley changing its character. The most well-known example is L. Sprague de Camp's Lest Darkness Fall in which an American archaeologist of the 1930's arrives at Visigothic Italy and manages to prevent the Dark Ages by introducing printing and other modern inventions. Leo Frankowski wrote the Conrad Stargard series where a Twentieth Century Pole arrives in Thirteenth Century Poland and by rapid industrialization manages to defeat the Mongol invasion. Poul Anderson presented an anti-thesis in his story The Man Who Came Early , where a modern American who finds himself in Viking Iceland fails to introduce modern technologies despite being an intelligent, competent and well-trained engineer, and finds that in a Tenth Century environment Tenth Century technologies work best. A new twist was introduced by S. M. Stirling in the Nantucket books and Eric Flint in the 1632 series, where it is not a single modern individual but a whole modern community (American in both cases) which is transported into the past - respectively to the Bronze Age and to the Germany of the Thirty Years' War - correspondingly increasing the plausibility of their ability to influence the past. In the view of some, this entire sub-genre inherited from Twain's original book the widespread mindset which regarded Western culture of its time as inherently superior to all other cultures, past and present. Specifically, it was asserted that Stirling's "Nantuckars" are depicted as embarking on colonial empire-building in the Bronze Age. An opposite tangent to all the above was taken by Ford Madox Ford in his Ladies whose bright eyes (1953) - a book which, despite having a time-travel theme of a sort, is usually classed as mainstream literature rather than science fiction. As its author explicitly stated, "(...)The idea of this book was sugggested to me by Mark Twain's Yankee at the Court of King Arthur. It occured to me to wonder what would really happen to a modern man thrown back to the Middle Ages...". In deliberate opposition to both Twain's Hank Morgan and all his above-mentioned follwers, Ford's Mr. Sorrel, an ineffectual publisher, does not try to change or modernise Medieval society. On the contrary, in this book it is the modern man who is instructed by the people (especially the women) of the past and eventualy returns to his own time a wiser person, having learned "the wisdom of history". See also | ||||||||
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