A Connecticut Yankee in
King Arthur's
Court - FULL
Audio Book - Part 1 of 2 - by
Mark Twain
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A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court is an 1889 novel by
American humorist and writer Mark Twain. The book was originally titled A
Yankee in King Arthur's Court. Some early editions are titled A Yankee at the Court of King Arthur.
In it, a Yankee engineer from
Connecticut is accidentally transported back in time to the court of King Arthur, where he fools the inhabitants of that time into thinking he is a magician - and soon uses his knowledge of modern technology to become a "magician" in earnest, stunning the
English of the
Early Middle Ages with such feats as demolitions, fireworks and the shoring up of a holy well. He attempts to modernize the past, but in the end he is unable to prevent the death of
Arthur and an interdict against him by the
Catholic Church of the time, which grows fearful of his power.
Twain wrote the book as a burlesque of
Romantic notions of chivalry after being inspired by a dream in which he was a knight himself, and severely inconvenienced by the weight and cumbersome nature of his armor.
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PLOT
The novel is a satirical comedy that looks at 6th-Century
England and its medieval culture through the eyes of
Hank Morgan, a
19th-century resident of
Hartford, Connecticut, who, after a blow to the head, awakens to find himself inexplicably transported back in time to early medieval England at the time of the legendary King Arthur. The fictional
Mr. Morgan, who had an image of that time that had been colored over the years by romantic myths, takes on the task of analyzing the problems and sharing his knowledge from 1300 years in the future to modernize, Americanize, and improve the lives of the people.
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While the book pokes fun at contemporary society, the main thrust is a satire of romanticized ideas of chivalry, and of the idealization of the
Middle Ages common in the novels of
Sir Walter Scott and other
19th century literature. Twain had a particular dislike for
Scott, blaming his kind of romanticism of battle for the southern states deciding to fight the
American Civil War. He writes in
Life on the Mississippi:
It was
Sir Walter that made every gentleman in the
South a
Major or a
Colonel, or a
General or a
Judge, before the war; and it was he, also, that made these gentlemen value these bogus decorations. For it was he that created rank and caste down there, and also reverence for rank and caste, and pride and pleasure in them
. [...] Sir Walter had so large a hand in making
Southern character, as it existed before the war, that he is in great measure responsible for the war.
For example, the book portrays the medieval people as being very gullible, as when
Merlin makes a "veil of invisibility", which according to him will make the wearer imperceptible to his enemies, though friends can still see him. The knight Sir Sagramor wears it to fight
Hank, who pretends he cannot see Sagramor for effect to the audience.
It is possible to see the book as an important transitional work for Twain, in that earlier, sunnier passages recall the frontier humor of his tall tales like
The Celebrated Jumping Frog of
Calaveras County, while the corrosive view of human behavior in the apocalyptic latter chapters is more akin to darker, later Twain works like
The Mysterious Stranger and
Letters from the Earth.
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While
Connecticut Yankee is sometimes credited as the foundational work in the time travel subgenre of science fiction, Twain's novel had several important immediate predecessors. Among them are
H.G. Wells's story "
The Chronic Argonauts" (
1888), which was a precursor to
The Time Machine (
1895). Also published the year before Connecticut Yankee was
Edward Bellamy's wildly popular
Looking Backward (1888), in which the protagonist is put into a hypnosis-induced sleep and wakes up in the year
2000.
Yet another American novel that could have served as a more direct inspiration to Twain was
The Fortunate Island (
1882) by
Charles Heber Clark. In this novel, a technically proficient American is shipwrecked on an island that broke off from
Britain during
Arthurian times, and never developed any further
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Since the beginning of the
20th century, this famous story has been adapted many times to stage, feature-length motion pictures, and animated cartoons. The earliest film version was Fox's
1921 silent version. In
1927, the novel was adapted into the musical, A Connecticut Yankee, by
Richard Rodgers and
Lorenz Hart. A
1931 film, also called A Connecticut Yankee, starred
Will Rogers.
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- published: 19 Jan 2013
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