ABSTRACT
Mark Twain's voice—the persona—focuses the literary comedy. Twain advanced literary comedy significantly by using the flexibility of his voice to blend plot and author, playing humor against the dramatization of events. The literary comedian thus came to occupy a place inside the novel by virtue of his characteristic attitude toward social and political events. Twain burlesques began to capture the political and moral overtones of the democracy. Burlesque travel narratives take on through such identifications a tension between the narrator—Twain the American—and the milieu—dominated by static religiosity, the corporate church. Twain was developing a sustained vision of society and an ethical stance out of the materials and techniques available in American literary comedy. The circus motif, which P. T. Barnum and Artemus Ward had developed as an American literary tradition, influences Twain's pose significantly, particularly in the crucial area of religion.
