Exposing Romantic Folly: Comic Performance in Mark Twain\u27s Foreign Travel Writing

This thesis explores Mark Twain\u27s three works of foreign travel literature, The Innocents Abroad, A Tramp Abroad, and Following the Equator using the rhetorical tool of comic performance. Comic performance as a tool of rhetorical analysis is defined using Kenneth Burke\u27s conception of the comic frame and Richard Bauman\u27s framework for performance. This tool is then used to explore Twain\u27s descriptions of foreign place, culture, and people in representative passages from each work in order to show how Twain uses his descriptive passages as a means to elicit social change