Pub Date : 2023-11-01DOI: 10.5325/marktwaij.21.1.0159
John Bird
The word “monumental” is certainly overused, but in the case of Alan Gribben’s Mark Twain’s Literary Resources: A Reconstruction of His Library and Reading, vol. 2, “monumental” is an understatement. In size, scope, scholarship, comprehensiveness, and execution, Gribben’s reference book will prove to be indispensable for scholars and for people interested in Mark Twain’s intellectual life for generations to come.This massive second volume is the follow-up to Gribben’s Mark Twain’s Literary Resources: A Reconstruction of his Library and Reading, vol. 1 (NewSouth Books/U of Georgia P, 2019), in which he recounts his research and provides an overview of Twain’s library and reading. But volume 2 is also the long-awaited expansion of Gribben’s previously monumental reference work, Mark Twain’s Library: A Reconstruction, published in 1980 but long out of print. That book was itself an expansion of Gribben’s 1974 Ph.D. dissertation at the University of California–Berkeley, the longest ever filed there. His research, begun in 1969, spans over five decades, the overflowing materials housed in two rooms of his house (as pictured in the book). The result of Gribben’s long labors and meticulous scholarship is not only perhaps the most valuable and important reference book on Mark Twain, but also an eloquent refutation of what Gribben calls “the recurrent charges by elitist literary critics and historians that Twain was more or less an intellectual lightweight whose writings merely survive on the fading strength of their comical qualities” (xi).Gribben continues, “I demonstrate that he read challenging works of philosophy, history, comparative religions, science, and astronomy, and that he was familiar with most of the respected literary artists who wrote in English in addition to European authors whose works he read in French, German, and Italian” (xi–xii). He argues thatIn addition to those three thousand volumes, Gribben catalogs titles that Twain refers to in his works and letters, bringing the total entries in this volume to nearly six thousand. Monumental indeed!Reconstructing Twain’s library was made necessary because of the dispersal of his books, including his donations to the Mark Twain Library in Redding, Connecticut (over 2,000 books, with all but 240 or so lost, discarded, or never returned by borrowers) and large auctions in 1911 and 1951. Gribben includes the Quarry Farm books owned by Theodore and Susan Crane, since Twain would have had access to them during his twenty years of visits to Elmira. The Annotated Catalog thus consists of lists and descriptions of, Gribben notes, “nearly 6,000 books, short stories, essays, poems, plays, operas, songs, newspapers, and magazines that Clemens mentioned or to which he had direct access” (xviii).Items in the Annotated Catalog are arranged alphabetically by authors’ names, with anonymous works listed by title. Entries include bibliographic data, signatures and inscriptions, marginalia if any, description
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Pub Date : 2023-11-01DOI: 10.5325/marktwaij.21.1.0163
Joseph Csicsila
Kent Rasmussen’s contributions to Mark Twain Studies are considerable. With more than a dozen collected editions, reference guides, and edited works, he has been a go-to scholar in the field since the appearance of his epic and indispensable Mark Twain A to Z in 1995. With Critical Insights: The Adventures of Tom Sawyer Rasmussen brings forward the work of Gary Scharnhorst’s pioneering Critical Essays on The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1993) by placing today’s scholars on the record regarding the book Alan Gribben aptly describes as “a classic overshadowed by its successor” (20). The premise here and presumably driving Rasmussen’s volume, of course, is that—for all kinds of reasons, including the rarefied place Adventures of Huckleberry Finn occupies in the American literary imagination—Tom Sawyer has not received the scholarly attention it deserves. Critical Insights: The Adventures of Tom Sawyer begins to rectify that reality with its unique combination of insightful commentaries, analytical essays, and practical resource materials.Critical Insights: The Adventures of Tom Sawyer features twenty-three original contributions by seventeen different scholars and is organized into three sections. The first grouping, “Critical Contexts,” consists of four essays that provide a range of historical and cultural perspectives for thinking about Twain’s novel in new and interesting ways. Peter Messent opens the collection with a reflection on the two timelines of Tom Sawyer (its setting in the 1840s and its composition in the 1870s) and how they impact Twain’s presentation of history in “Tom Sawyer’s Evasion of History.” It’s a powerhouse analysis that attempts to dislodge the novel’s reputation for nostalgia and makes a compelling case for Twain’s novel as “a profoundly anti-historical text” (3). Alan Gribben’s “Tom Sawyer: A Classic Overshadowed by Its Successor,” Joe B. Fulton’s “Thinking Like Jackson’s Island; Or, Why Tom Sawyer Is Good for the Environment,” and Philip Bader’s “Tom Sawyer and Harry Potter: The Boys Who Live” offer similarly innovative readings of the novel’s critical reputation, its use of imagery, and its influence on present-day writing, respectively.The book’s second section, “Critical Readings,” contains eleven essays that look more closely at Tom Sawyer’s characters, themes, and reception. John Bird’s “The Tom Sawyer Franchise: The Evolution (and Devolution) of Character” launches this part of the collection with a comprehensive and illuminating survey of Twain’s use of Tom over the course of his career. Bird’s conclusion that Tom devolves gradually but steadily into a cruel megalomaniac over the twenty years following his first appearance in 1876 is certain to shift critical understanding of Twain’s use of this and other characters in his body of work. The next two essays, Kevin MacDonnell’s “Tom Sawyer: From Boy-Book Hellion to Coming-of-Age Hellion” and K. Patrick Ober’s “Is Tom Sawyer an Idyllic Dream or a Boy’s Nightmare?” also
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Pub Date : 2023-11-01DOI: 10.5325/marktwaij.21.1.0020
Joshua Fagan
Abstract Far from being a mere rebuttal against romanticized views of the Middle Ages, Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court engages constructively with the medievalist milieu of the late-Victorian fin-de-siècle. Twain depicts sixth-century England as a time of squalor, but he extends a level of appreciation to the selflessness of King Arthur. Framing time-traveling rabble-rouser Hank Morgan as a symbol of both Enlightenment reformism and self-aggrandizing authoritarianism that justifies wanton violence through abstract claims of societal progress, Twain is as critical of industrial commercialism as of medieval feudalism. This article argues Twain engages with the same questions as the more overtly medievalist writers of the fin-de-siècle, specifically William Morris. While Morris was more laudatory toward the medieval period, this article asserts they both staunchly criticized the solipsism and obsession with technology they believed defined the industrial age without desiring merely to re-create the hierarchies of the past.
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Pub Date : 2023-11-01DOI: 10.5325/marktwaij.21.1.0061
Linda A. Morris
Abstract This article focuses on the final six years of Susy Clemens’s life, from the time she was admitted to Bryn Mawr College at the age of eighteen to her final days in Hartford, Connecticut, where she died unexpectedly of spinal meningitis while preparing to rejoin her parents in Europe. The article examines her romantic relationship with fellow student Louis Brownell and the effects of their separation on Susy when the Clemens family moved to Europe to cut back on their living expenses. It explores her struggles to make the transition from girlhood to young adulthood, including her engagement with Mind Cure in her determination to improve herself. Throughout, the article draws on letters from Susy to Louise, to her sister Clara, and to her mother, Livy, and it features letters from Livy expressing her ongoing concerns for her daughter’s well-being.
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Pub Date : 2023-11-01DOI: 10.5325/marktwaij.21.1.0156
Bruce Michelson
In a span of only seven years, the crowd that takes Mark Twain seriously has acquired six fat new volumes, 4,363 pages of rich, challenging biographical discourse to sort out. The first three of these tomes, the Mark Twain Project’s prodigiously annotated and introduced Autobiography of Mark Twain (2010–15), invites readers to rove back and forth between Sam’s free-form experiments in catching the motions of his own mind, and masses of “Explanatory Notes” that get the facts straighter and contextualize these cadenzas of reminiscence, whim, grief, and outrage. And now we have the completion of Gary Scharnhorst’s The Life of Mark Twain, a spectacular effort to assemble and narrate the entire earthly story: childhood, family life, apprenticeships, excursions, adventures, professional and artistic growth, friends and enemies, financial ups and owns, celebrity, triumphs, disasters, you name it.Scharnhorst launched into all this with extraordinary background and momentum. He has immersed himself for half a century—and to our collective benefit—not only in Mark Twain’s writings and spoken words out beyond the widely-published materials, but also in how he was was regarded by family members and friends, by people who tried to do business with him, and by reporters, reviewers, and critics at every level of cultural clout. Additionally, Scharnhorst has strong credentials as a biographer and critic of several of Mark Twain’s famous contemporaries, among them Bret Harte, Horatio Alger, Jr., Owen Wister, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Julian Hawthorne, and Kate Field. Scharnhorst knows the Mark Twain story as thoroughly as anyone on the planet, along with the wide, dynamic world in which Sam Clemens grew up, flourished, suffered, and died. All of this experience is mustered to great effect in this final volume of The Life of Mark Twain.It’s no secret that narrative accounts of this life, or of segments of it, are typically organized around some central theme: the private self versus the public identity; the literary successes and struggles; the morally conflicted would-be tycoon; the career as humorist and wit; the political, spiritual, or moral growth or turmoil. Rejecting that kind of structure and limitation, Scharnhorst for the most part upholds an ethic of “just the facts,” getting avalanches of dates, places, doings, and companionships ordered and clarified. Opening in June 1891, with the departure of the Clemens family for the sojourn in Western Europe that wouldn’t bring them all home again until the spring of 1895, The Final Years commingles the wanderings, the publishing gambits and failures that (along with the Paige Compositor) led up to bankruptcy, the struggles and false starts in writing, and the Mark Twain travel letters, speeches, essays, and fresh books that reached the public during this interlude. Attention centers on The American Claimant, Pudd’nhead Wilson, and eventually Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc, the deadpan historical novel tha
尽管这些数据对任何对马克·吐温后期作品的直接影响感兴趣的人来说都是有用的，但还是有一种诱惑会让人情不自禁地浏览一份又一份斜体字的清单，而仅仅是对使它们成形的档案劳动感到惊讶。然而，一个值得注意的例外是，沙恩霍斯特在1906年哈珀斯出版社出版《夏娃日记》时，恢复了一场很少被提及的滑稽的争议。这不是关于文字上的任何东西，而是关于莱斯特·拉尔夫(Lester Ralph)的几幅拉斐尔前派的线条画，把夏娃描绘成一个单纯的自然女孩，在咬了一口苹果后，她因赤身裸体而感到羞耻。事实上，马萨诸塞州的公共图书馆在此基础上禁止了这本多愁善感的小书——就在保罗·查巴斯的《九月早晨》——另一幅无辜的、令人发臭的裸体年轻女子户外照片——六年前——而激进的纽约军械库展览永久地动摇了裸体作为美国视觉艺术主题的地位。沙恩霍斯特非凡的职业道德，令人钦佩的自律，以及他对马克·吐温世界的渊博知识，在《最后的岁月》中随处可见。如果有几个时刻，叙述变成了不令人信服的评论，很难想象其他大型研究没有类似的失误，甚至更糟。例如，马克·吐温对大女儿苏西·克莱门斯的评价是:“山姆和李维的大女儿，被父母崇拜，在家庭爱情中被理想化，实际上是一个被宠坏的势力小人。”(27)——这一评价似乎是基于苏西写给家人和密友的几封信和评论，内容是1893年佛罗伦萨维维亚尼别墅附近的仆人和社交生活。值得记住的是，苏西在布林莫尔学院(Bryn Mawr College)上了一个学期就被她的母亲突然赶了出来，现在她在离家数千英里的地方跟着父母四处奔波，在那里，一个单身的年轻女性可以茁壮成长，维持友谊，甚至可能遇到终身伴侣。随着青春的流逝，她从一个租来的地方搬到另一个租来的地方，似乎永无止境。对这样的困境没有同情心吗?就在这本马克·吐温年鉴中，琳达·莫里斯为我们提供了充分的理由来表达同情。此外，书中有几页是在毫无影响的情况下，用来评判如何解读《笨蛋威尔逊》的文学批评混乱，以及它与种族、个人身份、社会阶级、南方以及其他所有问题的关系。这里的评论太简短了，无法解决任何问题，它以一种不同寻常的暗示达到高潮，即这部关于密西西比河的小说实际上是一种西部片，因为威尔逊本人“是一种横跨东西方的西部英雄，在秩序与混乱之间进行调解”(36)，因为萨姆“熟悉西部写作中的枪战等比喻”(36)，因为“在威尔逊房子后面的空间里，Luigi和Driscoll法官打了一场代理人决斗，引发了一系列不可避免的事件。但是，如果像这样的一些断言在这本权威的传记中“行不通”，那么这里有很多有用的和持久的贡献，可以帮助我们了解这位非凡的职业和遗产。《马克·吐温的一生:最后的岁月》无疑是任何真正对马克·吐温及其遗产感兴趣的人都应该阅读和珍惜的一本书。
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Pub Date : 2023-11-01DOI: 10.5325/marktwaij.21.1.0001
Seth Murray
Abstract This article is a critical reevaluation of Mark Twain’s “Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven.” The story is typically regarded as at best a piece of literary miscellany from Twain’s peculiar late period, and at worst a caricature of the religious sentimentalism of Elizabeth Stuart Phelps. While these claims have validity, they don’t tell the whole story. It is also a carefully worked-out meditation on a series of questions—belief, mortality, justice, and the quest for the most humane arrangement of life—with which Twain grappled throughout his whole career. This is accomplished by making the case for reading it not just as a light joke on or a cruel tirade against religious belief, but also as a Menippean satire. This case is made by drawing on thinkers like Northrop Frye, Gershom Scholem, and Richard Rorty in this effort, as well as historian of religions Jeffrey Kripal and Twain scholar Harold K. Bush. Repositioned in this light, “Stormfield” emerges as a crucial piece in assembling the puzzle that is Mark Twain.
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Pub Date : 2023-11-01DOI: 10.5325/marktwaij.21.1.0117
Seema Sharma
Abstract This article explores my journey of teaching Adventures of Huckleberry Finn to first-year undergraduate students in a Mumbai college. It outlines the pedagogical strategies and resources employed to make the text relevant in a “decolonized” classroom environment. It also retraces the path of discovery that Twain’s voice reverberates not only with the present-day U.S. concerns, but also that Indian students can relate to his writings on race, imperialism, social justice, and empathy in their own cultural context.
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Pub Date : 2023-11-01DOI: 10.5325/marktwaij.21.1.0143
Faith Ben-Daniels
Abstract This article outlines the practical pedagogical approach used in the teaching of Mark Twain’s The Diaries of Adam and Eve in a Ghanaian university, and how the chosen approach, which involves some amount of “enactment” of the text, guides students in focusing on the nuances encountered as part of their study of the text under the “World Literature” course. This article highlights how professors incorporate “enactment” as an approach to raise and sustain students’ interest in the text and to further guide students in identifying and discussing universal subject matters such as marriage, misogyny, and human fellowship from the text. Employing enactment creates in students a sense of ownership of the text and involvement in its study. The discussion concludes by highlighting the importance of maintaining such foreign texts in the academic curriculum, but not losing sight of the challenges academic faculties face by doing so.
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Pub Date : 2023-11-01DOI: 10.5325/marktwaij.21.1.0135
John Bird
Abstract A pedagogical essay reflecting on forty years of teaching Huckleberry Finn at both the high school and college level, recounting the author’s first experience teaching the novel, the expansion of the canon and the way that puts the novel in a broader context, and the importance of performing the dialect speech of various characters, modeling for students the way to read the novel for themselves. Even in perilous times for teaching controversial texts, the author suggests ways to teach Mark Twain’s masterpiece sensitively and effectively.
{"title":"“Like setting down on a kag of powder and touching it off just to see where you’ll go to”: Reflections on Forty Years of Teaching <i>Huckleberry Finn</i>","authors":"John Bird","doi":"10.5325/marktwaij.21.1.0135","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/marktwaij.21.1.0135","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract A pedagogical essay reflecting on forty years of teaching Huckleberry Finn at both the high school and college level, recounting the author’s first experience teaching the novel, the expansion of the canon and the way that puts the novel in a broader context, and the importance of performing the dialect speech of various characters, modeling for students the way to read the novel for themselves. Even in perilous times for teaching controversial texts, the author suggests ways to teach Mark Twain’s masterpiece sensitively and effectively.","PeriodicalId":41060,"journal":{"name":"Mark Twain Annual","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135411304","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-11-01DOI: 10.5325/marktwaij.21.1.0123
David E. E. Sloane
Abstract The n-word in Huckleberry Finn is a marker of bigotry as satirized by Mark Twain, but teaching it as humor requires preparation. The “NewSouth” edition without the n-word may be an alternative to the standard text, but a “CRASH!” of lightning provides drama for verbal presentation. Jonathan Swift, Petroleum V. Nasby, and Twain himself offend readers by using satire to expose social evils. After working with preparatory texts by such authors, students can be led to see how repeated intrusions of the n-word signal bad thinking and stupefied conscience even in “good” characters. The n-word becomes more and more intense throughout the novel because Twain is demonstrating how the mistreatment of Black Americans is an on-going problem. As students process the expanding irony, they can become more aware (and more angry) at how even good intentions can be ironically misdirected if the human subjects remain victims of unthinking prejudice through one word.
{"title":"Comic Attack: Mark Twain and the N-word in the Classroom","authors":"David E. E. Sloane","doi":"10.5325/marktwaij.21.1.0123","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/marktwaij.21.1.0123","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract The n-word in Huckleberry Finn is a marker of bigotry as satirized by Mark Twain, but teaching it as humor requires preparation. The “NewSouth” edition without the n-word may be an alternative to the standard text, but a “CRASH!” of lightning provides drama for verbal presentation. Jonathan Swift, Petroleum V. Nasby, and Twain himself offend readers by using satire to expose social evils. After working with preparatory texts by such authors, students can be led to see how repeated intrusions of the n-word signal bad thinking and stupefied conscience even in “good” characters. The n-word becomes more and more intense throughout the novel because Twain is demonstrating how the mistreatment of Black Americans is an on-going problem. As students process the expanding irony, they can become more aware (and more angry) at how even good intentions can be ironically misdirected if the human subjects remain victims of unthinking prejudice through one word.","PeriodicalId":41060,"journal":{"name":"Mark Twain Annual","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135411062","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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