Pub Date : 2022-09-28DOI: 10.5325/marktwaij.20.1.0100
K. Driscoll
Abstract:In chapter 57 of Roughing It, Mark Twain extols his experience of the West in terms that are at once highly idealized and strangely skewed: “It was a wild, free, disorderly, grotesque society! Only swarming hosts of stalwart men—nothing juvenile, nothing feminine, visible anywhere!” This description, however memorable, is also blatantly false. The 1860 federal census records 111 women in Virginia City and Gold Hill, “83 of whom were living with their husbands . . . and caring for more than 100 children.” Clemens’s cognizance of this fact is reflected in the circumstances of his own brother Orion, who, within a year of their 1861 arrival, was joined in Carson City by his wife and daughter, as well as in his reporting for the Virginia City Enterprise. This article explores the personal and cultural underpinnings of this omission, examining it in relation to conventional nineteenth-century gender hierarchies.
{"title":"Mark Twain’s Masculinist Fantasy of the West","authors":"K. Driscoll","doi":"10.5325/marktwaij.20.1.0100","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/marktwaij.20.1.0100","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:In chapter 57 of Roughing It, Mark Twain extols his experience of the West in terms that are at once highly idealized and strangely skewed: “It was a wild, free, disorderly, grotesque society! Only swarming hosts of stalwart men—nothing juvenile, nothing feminine, visible anywhere!” This description, however memorable, is also blatantly false. The 1860 federal census records 111 women in Virginia City and Gold Hill, “83 of whom were living with their husbands . . . and caring for more than 100 children.” Clemens’s cognizance of this fact is reflected in the circumstances of his own brother Orion, who, within a year of their 1861 arrival, was joined in Carson City by his wife and daughter, as well as in his reporting for the Virginia City Enterprise. This article explores the personal and cultural underpinnings of this omission, examining it in relation to conventional nineteenth-century gender hierarchies.","PeriodicalId":41060,"journal":{"name":"Mark Twain Annual","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2022-09-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42278317","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 : 2022-09-28DOI: 10.5325/marktwaij.20.1.0001
Bruce F Michelson
Abstract:In these essays marking the 150th anniversary of Roughing It, a provocative theme emerges: energetic experiment. This theme encompasses not only Mark Twain, his text, and places and times that they engage, but also the commentary itself: restless adaptation to worldly experience, new ways of engaging it, and the protean intention and significance of the book.
{"title":"Roughing It as Restless Art","authors":"Bruce F Michelson","doi":"10.5325/marktwaij.20.1.0001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/marktwaij.20.1.0001","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:In these essays marking the 150th anniversary of Roughing It, a provocative theme emerges: energetic experiment. This theme encompasses not only Mark Twain, his text, and places and times that they engage, but also the commentary itself: restless adaptation to worldly experience, new ways of engaging it, and the protean intention and significance of the book.","PeriodicalId":41060,"journal":{"name":"Mark Twain Annual","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2022-09-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45087146","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 : 2021-11-01DOI: 10.5325/marktwaij.19.1.0001
J. Caron, Bruce F Michelson
{"title":"A Querulous Query: What to Make of Something Called the “Autobiography of Mark Twain” / Bruce Michelson Replies","authors":"J. Caron, Bruce F Michelson","doi":"10.5325/marktwaij.19.1.0001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/marktwaij.19.1.0001","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":41060,"journal":{"name":"Mark Twain Annual","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2021-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47673539","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 : 2021-11-01DOI: 10.5325/marktwaij.19.1.0163
Nathaniel Williams
Abstract:Twain’s “A Murder, a Mystery, and a Marriage” was first published legally in 2001. In its final chapter, we learn the villain once worked for and subsequently murdered Jules Verne. The work is significant as the most prominent overt mention of the French author in Twain’s fiction; however, Twain’s correspondence with his brother Orion Clemens in 1877–78 suggests that Twain incorporated Verne into the work after their exchange. This would mean the manuscript was not written in 1876 as previously thought. If that is the case, it shows the duration of Twain’s dismissal of Verne and the role Orion Clemens played in developing that negative critical view and shaping the manuscript’s final chapter.
{"title":"The Mysterious Origins of Twain’s “Skeleton Novelette”","authors":"Nathaniel Williams","doi":"10.5325/marktwaij.19.1.0163","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/marktwaij.19.1.0163","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Twain’s “A Murder, a Mystery, and a Marriage” was first published legally in 2001. In its final chapter, we learn the villain once worked for and subsequently murdered Jules Verne. The work is significant as the most prominent overt mention of the French author in Twain’s fiction; however, Twain’s correspondence with his brother Orion Clemens in 1877–78 suggests that Twain incorporated Verne into the work after their exchange. This would mean the manuscript was not written in 1876 as previously thought. If that is the case, it shows the duration of Twain’s dismissal of Verne and the role Orion Clemens played in developing that negative critical view and shaping the manuscript’s final chapter.","PeriodicalId":41060,"journal":{"name":"Mark Twain Annual","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2021-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46806850","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 : 2021-11-01DOI: 10.5325/marktwaij.19.1.0176
Edward A. Shannon
Abstract:Themes of marriage and family animate The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and its immediate sequel, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, as well as later tales featuring these characters. While race remains a major point of interest in scholarship of Huckleberry Finn, it is also as a novel about children, childhood, and growing up. This essay traces a pattern of desexualizing Huck in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and subsequent stories. This picture of Huckleberry Finn, a “poor white” boy in the slaveholding South, reflects views then current in late nineteenth-century America. And to an extent, it reflects hesitation that Twain, the father of three daughters, may have felt in setting Huck on a path toward marriage and reproduction. Reading Huckleberry Finn in this context reveals a rich discourse on race and class distinct from (although related to) the issues of slavery and racism expressed in the novel.
{"title":"“Trash of the Veriest Sort”: Huck Finn’s Missing Sex Life","authors":"Edward A. Shannon","doi":"10.5325/marktwaij.19.1.0176","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/marktwaij.19.1.0176","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Themes of marriage and family animate The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and its immediate sequel, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, as well as later tales featuring these characters. While race remains a major point of interest in scholarship of Huckleberry Finn, it is also as a novel about children, childhood, and growing up. This essay traces a pattern of desexualizing Huck in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and subsequent stories. This picture of Huckleberry Finn, a “poor white” boy in the slaveholding South, reflects views then current in late nineteenth-century America. And to an extent, it reflects hesitation that Twain, the father of three daughters, may have felt in setting Huck on a path toward marriage and reproduction. Reading Huckleberry Finn in this context reveals a rich discourse on race and class distinct from (although related to) the issues of slavery and racism expressed in the novel.","PeriodicalId":41060,"journal":{"name":"Mark Twain Annual","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2021-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44300856","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 : 2021-11-01DOI: 10.5325/marktwaij.19.1.0040
Pasqualina
Abstract:This essay examines Twain’s anti-imperialism as a theory and method of visual mediation. In so doing, the essay reveals the degree to which Twain appropriated methods of colonial visual culture to formulate his critiques of imperialism, and it reconsiders the relationship between Twain’s anti-imperialism and his late embrace of a mechanistic, determinist philosophy of history and of human nature. The essay brings together a wide range of Twain’s late work—including Following the Equator, King Leopold’s Soliloquy, “To the Person Sitting in Darkness,” What Is Man?, “The United States of Lyncherdom,” and Twain’s autobiographical dictation on the Moro Crater Massacre—to consolidate a theory and method of “bringing home the picture” from Twain’s wide-ranging experiments in visual mediation. The essay argues that Twain’s primary contributions to anti-imperialist thought lie principally in the mediational strategies he developed to transmute geopolitical abstractions into immediate images.
{"title":"Bringing Home the Picture: Mark Twain’s Anti-Imperialism as Visual Mediation","authors":"Pasqualina","doi":"10.5325/marktwaij.19.1.0040","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/marktwaij.19.1.0040","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This essay examines Twain’s anti-imperialism as a theory and method of visual mediation. In so doing, the essay reveals the degree to which Twain appropriated methods of colonial visual culture to formulate his critiques of imperialism, and it reconsiders the relationship between Twain’s anti-imperialism and his late embrace of a mechanistic, determinist philosophy of history and of human nature. The essay brings together a wide range of Twain’s late work—including Following the Equator, King Leopold’s Soliloquy, “To the Person Sitting in Darkness,” What Is Man?, “The United States of Lyncherdom,” and Twain’s autobiographical dictation on the Moro Crater Massacre—to consolidate a theory and method of “bringing home the picture” from Twain’s wide-ranging experiments in visual mediation. The essay argues that Twain’s primary contributions to anti-imperialist thought lie principally in the mediational strategies he developed to transmute geopolitical abstractions into immediate images.","PeriodicalId":41060,"journal":{"name":"Mark Twain Annual","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2021-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45506923","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 : 2021-11-01DOI: 10.5325/marktwaij.19.1.0095
J. Baggett
Abstract:Mark Twain’s engagement with the “infernal phraseology of the law” spanned his career: from his sketches in Virginia City to the courtroom trials of his novels. Working in the context of legal reform movements, and using his own knowledge and mastery of law and procedure, Twain’s legal burlesques develop into fully dramatized narratives of humor and satire in which legal rhetoric and the vernacular act as “infernal or subversive agents” of the authority inherent in the law. Thus, at a time when Samuel Clemens began to fashion the voice of Mark Twain, he worked within the context of reform movements that would democratize and demythologize legal language.
{"title":"Mark Twain’s Legal Burlesques and the Democratization of American Legalese","authors":"J. Baggett","doi":"10.5325/marktwaij.19.1.0095","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/marktwaij.19.1.0095","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Mark Twain’s engagement with the “infernal phraseology of the law” spanned his career: from his sketches in Virginia City to the courtroom trials of his novels. Working in the context of legal reform movements, and using his own knowledge and mastery of law and procedure, Twain’s legal burlesques develop into fully dramatized narratives of humor and satire in which legal rhetoric and the vernacular act as “infernal or subversive agents” of the authority inherent in the law. Thus, at a time when Samuel Clemens began to fashion the voice of Mark Twain, he worked within the context of reform movements that would democratize and demythologize legal language.","PeriodicalId":41060,"journal":{"name":"Mark Twain Annual","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2021-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49182393","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 : 2021-11-01DOI: 10.5325/marktwaij.19.1.0118
Lawrence W. Howe
Abstract:A surprising number of Mark Twain’s texts include inheritance as a plot point and sometimes as a major premise, such as in The Gilded Age where he converted his family’s disappointment about the Tennessee land into the engine of his first major work of fiction. This essay will discuss how a number of these texts project a skeptical attitude, even a satirical perspective, about how inter-generational wealth functions and how it affects the behavior of those who anticipate an inheritance. In so doing, Twain’s writings about inheritance show how property rights rely on various discourses as the often-shaky building blocks of hereditary claims.
{"title":"Mark Twain and Estate Planning","authors":"Lawrence W. Howe","doi":"10.5325/marktwaij.19.1.0118","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/marktwaij.19.1.0118","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:A surprising number of Mark Twain’s texts include inheritance as a plot point and sometimes as a major premise, such as in The Gilded Age where he converted his family’s disappointment about the Tennessee land into the engine of his first major work of fiction. This essay will discuss how a number of these texts project a skeptical attitude, even a satirical perspective, about how inter-generational wealth functions and how it affects the behavior of those who anticipate an inheritance. In so doing, Twain’s writings about inheritance show how property rights rely on various discourses as the often-shaky building blocks of hereditary claims.","PeriodicalId":41060,"journal":{"name":"Mark Twain Annual","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2021-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42379195","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 : 2021-11-01DOI: 10.5325/marktwaij.19.1.0068
Avery Blankenship
Abstract:Twain’s early career as a newspaper reporter and sketch writer demonstrates the messiness of his early relationship to the American periodical landscape. Using reprint detection methods developed by the Viral Texts project, this article explores incidents in Twain’s early career in which his name was added to a text in circulation, removed from a text, or the text itself was recontextualized as it circulated in newspapers. While Twain would later become a media mastermind in this burgeoning age of mass-media print production, these messier beginnings show Twain struggling, and sometimes failing, to exert his influence over the trajectory of his writing.
{"title":"Twain in Circulation: Early Twain and the Culture of Reprinting","authors":"Avery Blankenship","doi":"10.5325/marktwaij.19.1.0068","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/marktwaij.19.1.0068","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Twain’s early career as a newspaper reporter and sketch writer demonstrates the messiness of his early relationship to the American periodical landscape. Using reprint detection methods developed by the Viral Texts project, this article explores incidents in Twain’s early career in which his name was added to a text in circulation, removed from a text, or the text itself was recontextualized as it circulated in newspapers. While Twain would later become a media mastermind in this burgeoning age of mass-media print production, these messier beginnings show Twain struggling, and sometimes failing, to exert his influence over the trajectory of his writing.","PeriodicalId":41060,"journal":{"name":"Mark Twain Annual","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2021-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46734180","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 : 2021-07-22DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192894922.003.0007
G. Smith
During the final decade of his life, Twain received several devastating blows—the death of his beloved wife in 1904, the death of his daughter Jean in 1909, and his own declining health. These and other problems have led some scholars to portray him as a bitter, cynical, disillusioned codger who was hamstrung by his misfortunes and angry as his creative powers diminished and his health deteriorated. This, they say, led him to repudiate Christianity, adopt a deterministic worldview, and savagely rail against an implacable, depraved God, a hypocritical, heartless Christianity and the damned human race. Twain’s writings during his final decade allegedly displayed his relentless despair as he embraced social and spiritual nihilism. At the same time, his criticisms of various groups including missionaries, villains, especially Russian Czar Nicholas II and Belgian King Leopold II, and several ideologies—militarism, imperialism, anti-Semitism—became increasingly caustic.
{"title":"The 1900s","authors":"G. Smith","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780192894922.003.0007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780192894922.003.0007","url":null,"abstract":"During the final decade of his life, Twain received several devastating blows—the death of his beloved wife in 1904, the death of his daughter Jean in 1909, and his own declining health. These and other problems have led some scholars to portray him as a bitter, cynical, disillusioned codger who was hamstrung by his misfortunes and angry as his creative powers diminished and his health deteriorated. This, they say, led him to repudiate Christianity, adopt a deterministic worldview, and savagely rail against an implacable, depraved God, a hypocritical, heartless Christianity and the damned human race. Twain’s writings during his final decade allegedly displayed his relentless despair as he embraced social and spiritual nihilism. At the same time, his criticisms of various groups including missionaries, villains, especially Russian Czar Nicholas II and Belgian King Leopold II, and several ideologies—militarism, imperialism, anti-Semitism—became increasingly caustic.","PeriodicalId":41060,"journal":{"name":"Mark Twain Annual","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2021-07-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82065461","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}
京公网安备 11010802042870号
京ICP备2023020795号-1
扫码关注我们
求助内容：
应助结果提醒方式：