书名：A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court康州美国佬大闹亚瑟王朝
难度：Lexile蓝思阅读指数1080
作者：Mark Twain马克·吐温
出版社名称：Signet Classics
出版时间：2004
语种：英文
ISBN：9780451529589
商品尺寸：10.7 x 2.5 x 17.1 cm
包装：平装
页数：366 （以实物为准）

A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court《康州美国佬大闹亚瑟王朝》是幽默文学大师马克·吐温发表于1889年的一部穿越题材小说，开创了穿越题材的先河，堪称穿越文学小说的鼻祖，是文学史上的里程碑。马克吐温以其一贯高超的文学手法，结合当时新颖的穿越题材，创作了一部经典的幽默讽刺小说。现已被翻译为各种语言，深受全世界文学爱好者的青睐。
推荐理由：
1.经典文学，老少咸宜，每个年龄层的读者都能产生不同的阅读感受；
2.马克吐温精湛的写作手法，值得文学爱好者细细品读；
3.十九世纪文学的代表性作品，早期的穿越小说，适合读者了解当时社会现实；
4.英文原版书籍，另附LelandKrauth的序言和Edmund Reiss写的后记，适合英语学习者使用；
5.体积轻巧，便于携带，方便随时随地阅读。

Published in 1889,Connecticut Yankeeis one of the world’s first stories about time travel. MarkTwain’s interest in travel to “old worlds” was a longstanding one, as his first book shows. And his interest in the British past was also a lifelong preoccupation, as can be seen in texts like The Prince and the Pauper, or even the Memory-Builder game he invented and patented to help American children learn the dates of England’s various monarchies. As MarkTwain’s fantastic attempt to locate his time and place in terms of its imagined pasts and its possible futures, Connecticut Yankee is perhaps his most complex book.
Reviews:
“ItisTwain’s best work and an object-lesson in democracy”.—William Dean Howells
“The final scenes of ‘Connecticut Yankee’ depict a mass force attempting to storm a position defended by wire and machine guns—and getting massacred, none reaching their objective. Deduct the fantasy anachronism of the assailants being Medieval knights, and you get a chillingly accurate prediction of a typical First World War battle. (...) The modern soldiers of 1914 with their bayonets had no more chance to win such a fight than Twain’s knights.”—George Hardy

A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Courtis an 1889 novel by American humorist and writer Mark Twain.In the book, 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.

In his person and in his pursuits,Mark Twain(1835-1910) was a man of extraordinary contrasts. Although he left school at twelve, when his father died, he was eventually awarded honorary degrees from Yale University, the University of Missouri, and Oxford University. His career encompassed such varied occupations as printer, Mississippi riverboat pilot, journalist, travel writer, and publisher. He made fortunes from his writing, but toward the end of his life he had to resort to lecture tours to pay Ms debts. He was hot-tempered, profane, and sentimental—and also pessimistic, cynical, and tortured by self-doubt. His nostalgia for the past helped produce some of his best books. He lives in American letters as a great artist, the writer whom William Dean Howells called"the Lincoln of our literature."

LelandKrauthis a professor of English at the University of Colorado at Boulder. A specialist in American literature, he has published numerous articles on American writers,as well as two books on Mark Twain:Proper MarkTwainandMark Twain & Company: Six Literary Relations.

Edmund Reisshas written extensively on literature and the history of ideas from the sixth century to the nineteenth century. His books include studies of Boethius, Arthurian legend and literature, medieval lyrical poetry, and editions of Mark Twain. Formerly professor of English at Duke University, as well as Brooks Professor at the University of Queensland, heis retired on his farmin Durham, North Carolina.

Chapter I
Camelot

“Camelot-Camelot,” said I to myself. “I don’t seem to remember hearing of it before. Name of the asylum, likely.”

It was a soft, reposeful summer landscape, as lovely as a dream, and as lonesome as Sunday. The air was full of the smell of flowers, and the buzzing of insects, and the twittering of birds, and there were no people, no wagons, there was no stir of life, nothing going on. The road was mainly a winding path with hoofprints in it, and now and then a faint trace of wheels on either side in the grass-wheels that apparently had a tire as broad as one’s hand.

Presently a fair slip of a girl, about ten years old, with a cataract of golden hair streaming down over her shoulders, came along. Around her head she wore a hoop of flame-red poppies. It was as sweet an outfit as ever I saw, what there was of it. She walked indolently along, with a mind at rest, its peace reflected in her innocent face. The circus man paid no attention to her; didn’t even seem to see her. And she-she was no more startled at his fantastic make-up than if she was used to his like every day of her life. She was going by as indifferently as she might have gone by a couple of cows; but when she happened to notice me, then there was a change! Up went her hands, and she was turned to stone; her mouth dropped open, her eyes stared wide and timorously, she was the picture of astonished curiosity touched with fear. And there she stood gazing, in a sort of stupefied fascination, till we turned a corner of the wood and were lost to her view. That she should be startled at me instead of at the other man, was too many for me; I couldn’t make head or tail of it. And that she should seem to consider me a spectacle, and totally overlook her own merits in that respect, was another puzzling thing, and a display of magnanimity, too, that was surprising in one so young. There was food for thought here. I moved along as one in a dream.

As we approached the town, signs of life began to appear. At intervals we passed a wretched cabin, with a thatched roof, and about it small fields and garden patches in an indifferent state of cultivation. There were people, too; brawny men, with long, coarse, uncombed hair that hung down over their faces and made them look like animals. They and the women, as a rule, wore a coarse tow-linen robe that came well below the knee, and a rude sort of sandals, and many wore an iron collar. The small boys and girls were always naked; but nobody seemed to know it. All of these people stared at me, talked about me, ran into the huts and fetched out their families to gape at me; but nobody ever noticed that other fellow, except to make him humble salutation and get no response for their pains.

In the town were some substantial windowless houses of stone scattered among a wilderness of thatched cabins; the streets were mere crooked alleys, and unpaved; troops of dogs and nude children played in the sun and made life and noise; hogs roamed and rooted contentedly about, and one of them lay in a reeking wallow in the middle of the main thoroughfare and suckled her family. Presently there was a distant blare of military music; it came nearer, still nearer, and soon a noble cavalcade wound into view, glorious with plumed helmets and flashing mail and flaunting banners and rich doublets and horse-cloths and gilded spearheads; and through the muck and swine, and naked brats, and joyous dogs, and shabby huts it took its gallant way, and in its wake we followed. Followed through one winding alley and then another,-and climbing, always climbing-till at last we gained the breezy height where the huge castle stood. There was an exchange of bugle blasts; then a parley from the walls, where men-at-arms, in hauberk and morion marched back and forth with halberd at shoulder under flapping banners with the rude figure of a dragon displayed upon them; and then the great gates were flung open, the drawbridge was lowered, and the head of the cavalcade swept forward under the frowning arches; and we, following, soon found ourselves in a great paved court, with towersand turrets stretching up into the blue air on all the four sides; and all about us the dismount was going on, and much greeting and ceremony, and running to and fro, and a gay display of moving and intermingling colors, and an altogether pleasant stir and noise and confusion.