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lucyb's review
3.0
This is the first time I've reread the book since I was 12... and I still think King Arthur doesn't get his due in it. From an adult perspective, though, it's a fascinatingly multi-layered text, in which deliberate (and perhaps accidental) ironies are as numerous as lances at a tournament. Hank's own creeds are as fanatically embraced as those he critiques... he just claims to have reason on his side. The strange, imagined medieval world in which Church and monarchy have a stranglehold on the populace is one no historian would recognize, but which many of my undergraduate students would; it's a durable image, that tells us much about Twain's American prejudices and our own.
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