Hello, Dude: Philology, Performance, and Technology in Twain's Connecticut Yankee

With its witty blend of social satire and literary criticism, its associations of historical romance and political intrigue, and its prescient reflections on those late-nineteenth-century technologies that Mark Twain knew would make his own world seem, to future readers, as remote as Arthur’s Britain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889) synthesizes what many critics have come to see as the central project of its author’s late career. Much has been made, for example, of the novel’s place in Twain’s medievalist preoccupations and, more broadly, in the larger fascination with the medieval art, architecture, literature, and politics that shaped the later nineteenth century’s social historiography. The novel, too, has stood as a centerpiece in recent critical accounts of Twain’s conception of a culture of performance—a response to the dramatic and political arenas of role-playing, literary authorship, and social impersonation characteristic of the last