

@mastersthesis {6479,
	title = {The sense of loss: {A} comparative study of careers and work of {Henry} {Adams} and {Mark} {Twain}},
	year = {1990},
	note = {9107856},
	school = {Tulane University},
	type = {phdPh.{D}.},
	address = {Ann Arbor},
	abstract = {The sense of loss present in the works of Henry Adams and Mark Twain presents a curious parallel. That two men of such different backgrounds and temperaments should reach nearly identical conclusions about American society and the universe at the end of the nineteenth century creates a strong impression that their despair was not entirely personal but also had a basis in their observation of historical changes in the world around them. Moving chronologically, this study seeks to understand the struggle of the two writers to make sense of their changing world. Nurtured in the Adams family with a typical patrician sensibility, Adams early decided to wash his hands of politics. Dissatisfied and disillusioned with the life after the Civil War, Adams began wandering around the world. The panic of 1893 made Adams see his own suffering in relation to a cosmic scheme. He found a "meaning" of the Middle Ages among French cathedrals, but he also realized that the unity of the Virgin necessarily belonged to the past. Consciously depicting his as a representative American experience, Adams wrote the Education in order to record the failure of everything in America. Mark Twain achieved the American dream in the midst of changes after the Civil War. To him writing was one of the means of making money, and even after Huckleberry Finn, he never had enough confidence in himself as writer. Beginning with the panic of 1893, Twain was hard hit by a series of personal tragedies, and he started his long wandering through the world. Because he lacked a sense of direction and dedication in his art, Twain left most of his later work unfinished and unpublished, but in his confusion and despair, he also left works that are true records of the travails of the human spirit in a rapidly changing world. The works of Adams and Twain in their last years show their faithful recording of the intellectual climate of their age and their distinctive responses to their sense of loss.},
	keywords = {0304:Biographies, 0323:American studies, 0591:American literature, Adams, American literature, American studies, Biographies, Henry, Language, literature and linguistics, Mark, Social sciences, Twain},
	url = {http://search.proquest.com/docview/303892902?accountid=14270},
	author = {Kim, Kathryn Jongsoon}
}
