Pub Date : 2020-11-19DOI: 10.5325/marktwaij.18.1.0111
Seybold
Abstract:Fred Funston, an alleged hero of the Philippine-American War, was enjoying a fleeting celebrity, including rumors of becoming President Theodore Roosevelt's running mate. Using only a satiric essay in the North American Review, "A Defense of General Funston," and a letter to the editor of the Denver Post, near where Funston was then stationed, Mark Twain generated a controversy that lasted for months, was covered by many newspapers throughout the continental United States, and succeeded in destroying Funston's reputation. This relatively minor episode in Twain's life reveals not only how he was able to leverage his celebrity and manipulate the US mass media during the final decade of his life, but also how the mass media environment, which had continually expanded and diversified over the course of the nineteenth century, had become a site of cultural power.
{"title":"Trollfighting Mark Twain: Viral Media and the Funston Feud","authors":"Seybold","doi":"10.5325/marktwaij.18.1.0111","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/marktwaij.18.1.0111","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Fred Funston, an alleged hero of the Philippine-American War, was enjoying a fleeting celebrity, including rumors of becoming President Theodore Roosevelt's running mate. Using only a satiric essay in the North American Review, \"A Defense of General Funston,\" and a letter to the editor of the Denver Post, near where Funston was then stationed, Mark Twain generated a controversy that lasted for months, was covered by many newspapers throughout the continental United States, and succeeded in destroying Funston's reputation. This relatively minor episode in Twain's life reveals not only how he was able to leverage his celebrity and manipulate the US mass media during the final decade of his life, but also how the mass media environment, which had continually expanded and diversified over the course of the nineteenth century, had become a site of cultural power.","PeriodicalId":41060,"journal":{"name":"Mark Twain Annual","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2020-11-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45263266","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 : 2020-11-19DOI: 10.5325/marktwaij.18.1.0065
Ohge
Abstract:Mark Twain did not publish any significant reflections on abolitionism in his lifetime, yet he did leave in his papers "A Scrap of Curious History," an unfinished attempt to write fiction about abolitionist activity in antebellum Missouri that was initiated not by memory but by his witnessing a backlash to anarchist uprisings in France in 1894. His biographer Albert Bigelow Paine published a revised and expurgated version of "A Scrap of Curious History" in Harper's Monthly a few years after Clemens's death, but existing commentary on the sketch has been minimal and has relied on Paine's bowdlerized text, not on the surviving manuscript. Paine's changes—including his writing a conclusion to the piece—deviated from Mark Twain's intentions to write a dramatic sketch, ponderously open-ended and blunt, that examined the anxieties underlying radical politics and their relation to justice, terrorism, and social progress.
{"title":"\"It was a mistake\": Abolitionism, Revision, and Mark Twain's \"A Scrap of Curious History\"","authors":"Ohge","doi":"10.5325/marktwaij.18.1.0065","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/marktwaij.18.1.0065","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Mark Twain did not publish any significant reflections on abolitionism in his lifetime, yet he did leave in his papers \"A Scrap of Curious History,\" an unfinished attempt to write fiction about abolitionist activity in antebellum Missouri that was initiated not by memory but by his witnessing a backlash to anarchist uprisings in France in 1894. His biographer Albert Bigelow Paine published a revised and expurgated version of \"A Scrap of Curious History\" in Harper's Monthly a few years after Clemens's death, but existing commentary on the sketch has been minimal and has relied on Paine's bowdlerized text, not on the surviving manuscript. Paine's changes—including his writing a conclusion to the piece—deviated from Mark Twain's intentions to write a dramatic sketch, ponderously open-ended and blunt, that examined the anxieties underlying radical politics and their relation to justice, terrorism, and social progress.","PeriodicalId":41060,"journal":{"name":"Mark Twain Annual","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2020-11-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44686637","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 : 2020-11-19DOI: 10.5325/marktwaij.18.1.0152
Cadle
Abstract:Instead of reading Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc as an anomaly within Mark Twain's oeuvre, this article analyzes it within the context of the Romantic Revival, a wave of popular fiction that dominated bestseller lists during the 1890s and 1900s. The features of the novel that critics tend to dismiss—its sentimentalism, apparent acceptance of supernatural events, and so forth—constitute a direct and purposeful engagement with the conventions of romance, in contrast to Twain's more subversive treatment of those conventions elsewhere. This article contends that Personal Recollections Joan of Arc serves as an example of emergent modernism, which results from the dialectical process at work in the historical struggle between realism and romance and from the novel's own attempt to work through the tensions between two modes of fiction. Throughout the novel, Twain exploits and thematizes those tensions, in turn creating greater ambiguity and irony.
{"title":"Mark Twain and the Romantic Revival","authors":"Cadle","doi":"10.5325/marktwaij.18.1.0152","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/marktwaij.18.1.0152","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Instead of reading Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc as an anomaly within Mark Twain's oeuvre, this article analyzes it within the context of the Romantic Revival, a wave of popular fiction that dominated bestseller lists during the 1890s and 1900s. The features of the novel that critics tend to dismiss—its sentimentalism, apparent acceptance of supernatural events, and so forth—constitute a direct and purposeful engagement with the conventions of romance, in contrast to Twain's more subversive treatment of those conventions elsewhere. This article contends that Personal Recollections Joan of Arc serves as an example of emergent modernism, which results from the dialectical process at work in the historical struggle between realism and romance and from the novel's own attempt to work through the tensions between two modes of fiction. Throughout the novel, Twain exploits and thematizes those tensions, in turn creating greater ambiguity and irony.","PeriodicalId":41060,"journal":{"name":"Mark Twain Annual","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2020-11-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47394031","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 : 2020-11-19DOI: 10.5325/marktwaij.18.1.0022
S. Harris
Abstract:How and why should Mark Twain scholars use literary theory? Although the American academy is no longer under the mandate to "theorize" everything, theory is still with us, and American literature scholars still have to decide where they stand in relationship to it. Twain studies, especially, seem resistant to theorizing, if for no other reason than Twain's persistent inconsistencies, which thwart systematic analysis. As a consequence, many Twain scholars ignore theory, working instead within the confines of traditional historical, biographical, and literary studies. In the process they produce excellent critical studies and engaging histories. Yet I often wonder what they might discover should they allow theory more space in their projects. Looking back over my own engagements with theory has strengthened my sense that used judiciously, literary theory can be a powerful tool, forcing us to think through phenomena we might otherwise ignore and teaching us how to articulate insights for which more traditional methodologies do not provide vocabulary—such as Twain's inconsistencies. In the following essay I offer my own history, not in order to trot out my vita, but in the hopes that my experience will invite a conversation over the relevance and uses of theory for Mark Twain studies.
{"title":"Theorizing Twain: A Personal View","authors":"S. Harris","doi":"10.5325/marktwaij.18.1.0022","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/marktwaij.18.1.0022","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:How and why should Mark Twain scholars use literary theory? Although the American academy is no longer under the mandate to \"theorize\" everything, theory is still with us, and American literature scholars still have to decide where they stand in relationship to it. Twain studies, especially, seem resistant to theorizing, if for no other reason than Twain's persistent inconsistencies, which thwart systematic analysis. As a consequence, many Twain scholars ignore theory, working instead within the confines of traditional historical, biographical, and literary studies. In the process they produce excellent critical studies and engaging histories. Yet I often wonder what they might discover should they allow theory more space in their projects. Looking back over my own engagements with theory has strengthened my sense that used judiciously, literary theory can be a powerful tool, forcing us to think through phenomena we might otherwise ignore and teaching us how to articulate insights for which more traditional methodologies do not provide vocabulary—such as Twain's inconsistencies. In the following essay I offer my own history, not in order to trot out my vita, but in the hopes that my experience will invite a conversation over the relevance and uses of theory for Mark Twain studies.","PeriodicalId":41060,"journal":{"name":"Mark Twain Annual","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2020-11-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41805933","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 : 2020-11-19DOI: 10.5325/marktwaij.18.1.0040
Blake Bronson-Bartlett
Abstract:This article proposes that readers of Twain's The Mysterious Stranger should not rely on printed versions of the story alone, but approach the story as an editor would, considering the incomplete drafts as constitutive of the work's structure, characters, and themes. The prospect of a digital edition of The Mysterious Stranger, informed by a variety of editorial theories and practices (critical text editing, the sociology of texts, fluid-text theory, and digital documentary editing), serves as the article's premise for a materially and technologically informed interpretation of the tale's past and future, in print and online.
{"title":"The Mysterious Stranger's Crisis of Duplicates: Incompletion and the Vexed Transmission of Twain's Late Writings","authors":"Blake Bronson-Bartlett","doi":"10.5325/marktwaij.18.1.0040","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/marktwaij.18.1.0040","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This article proposes that readers of Twain's The Mysterious Stranger should not rely on printed versions of the story alone, but approach the story as an editor would, considering the incomplete drafts as constitutive of the work's structure, characters, and themes. The prospect of a digital edition of The Mysterious Stranger, informed by a variety of editorial theories and practices (critical text editing, the sociology of texts, fluid-text theory, and digital documentary editing), serves as the article's premise for a materially and technologically informed interpretation of the tale's past and future, in print and online.","PeriodicalId":41060,"journal":{"name":"Mark Twain Annual","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2020-11-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48970432","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 : 2020-11-19DOI: 10.5325/marktwaij.18.1.0001
Roark
Abstract:This article explores two methods that have allowed me to teach Adventures of Huckleberry Finn at a high school that straddles the racial dividing line in Kansas City, Missouri. In my class, students discuss the racially constructed boundaries the novel exploits. We then contextualize the current racial boundaries expressed in our cities and in our schools by reviewing census maps and reports and apply these trends to Twain's literary situations. Second, we view these literary situations and their characters within a Menippean satirical framework, whereby characters represent mental attitudes of people within a culture. By employing these two methods my students question how our mental attitudes have, or in some cases, have not changed over time.
{"title":"Teaching Racial Boundaries: How Mark Twain's Characters Expose Our \"Mental Attitudes\" about Race and Racism","authors":"Roark","doi":"10.5325/marktwaij.18.1.0001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/marktwaij.18.1.0001","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This article explores two methods that have allowed me to teach Adventures of Huckleberry Finn at a high school that straddles the racial dividing line in Kansas City, Missouri. In my class, students discuss the racially constructed boundaries the novel exploits. We then contextualize the current racial boundaries expressed in our cities and in our schools by reviewing census maps and reports and apply these trends to Twain's literary situations. Second, we view these literary situations and their characters within a Menippean satirical framework, whereby characters represent mental attitudes of people within a culture. By employing these two methods my students question how our mental attitudes have, or in some cases, have not changed over time.","PeriodicalId":41060,"journal":{"name":"Mark Twain Annual","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2020-11-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48232782","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 : 2020-11-19DOI: 10.5325/marktwaij.18.1.0123
Nathaniel Williams
Abstract:Twain's unfinished essay on William Clark Russell's Wreck of the Grosvenor (1877) was intended as a follow-up to "Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses." In topic and content, Twain's Grosvenor essay recontextualizes how we read its famous predecessor. Unlike the Cooper essay—so often framed by textbooks as an American-centric statement on literary values—Twain's essay on Russell targets a still-living English writer and highly praises his compositions. Moreover, Russell wrote in a genre (the sea narrative) that, as oceanic studies scholars have suggested, decenters nationalism. Twain enjoyed Russell's naval fiction throughout his life, evinced by journal entries, letters, and an aborted burlesque of sea stories. Ultimately, Twain's genuine admiration for Russell's work made it hard for him muster the same comedic vitriol for British sea narratives that he did for Cooper's historical novels.
{"title":"Oceanic Fiction, W. Clark Russell, and Twain's Sequel to \"Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses\"","authors":"Nathaniel Williams","doi":"10.5325/marktwaij.18.1.0123","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/marktwaij.18.1.0123","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Twain's unfinished essay on William Clark Russell's Wreck of the Grosvenor (1877) was intended as a follow-up to \"Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses.\" In topic and content, Twain's Grosvenor essay recontextualizes how we read its famous predecessor. Unlike the Cooper essay—so often framed by textbooks as an American-centric statement on literary values—Twain's essay on Russell targets a still-living English writer and highly praises his compositions. Moreover, Russell wrote in a genre (the sea narrative) that, as oceanic studies scholars have suggested, decenters nationalism. Twain enjoyed Russell's naval fiction throughout his life, evinced by journal entries, letters, and an aborted burlesque of sea stories. Ultimately, Twain's genuine admiration for Russell's work made it hard for him muster the same comedic vitriol for British sea narratives that he did for Cooper's historical novels.","PeriodicalId":41060,"journal":{"name":"Mark Twain Annual","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2020-11-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47184567","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 : 2020-11-19DOI: 10.5325/marktwaij.18.1.0011
Jean S. Filetti
Abstract:Just as Jackson's Island in Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn provides a brave space for Huck and Jim that encourages both characters to think beyond their binary divisions and established rules of conduct, teaching the novel within the constructs of a brave space classroom provides students with a forum in which uncomfortable and difficult conversations about race, power, and privilege can happen. Like Huck and Jim prior to encountering each other on Jackson's Island, students enter the classroom with physical, emotional, and psychological identities and preconceived notions about the "other." By pedagogically transforming the classroom from a safe space to a brave space, teachers can teach students that risky and difficult dialogue advances learning and can lay the groundwork for growth and change.
{"title":"Huck and Jim's Island Time in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and the Importance of Brave Spaces","authors":"Jean S. Filetti","doi":"10.5325/marktwaij.18.1.0011","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/marktwaij.18.1.0011","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Just as Jackson's Island in Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn provides a brave space for Huck and Jim that encourages both characters to think beyond their binary divisions and established rules of conduct, teaching the novel within the constructs of a brave space classroom provides students with a forum in which uncomfortable and difficult conversations about race, power, and privilege can happen. Like Huck and Jim prior to encountering each other on Jackson's Island, students enter the classroom with physical, emotional, and psychological identities and preconceived notions about the \"other.\" By pedagogically transforming the classroom from a safe space to a brave space, teachers can teach students that risky and difficult dialogue advances learning and can lay the groundwork for growth and change.","PeriodicalId":41060,"journal":{"name":"Mark Twain Annual","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2020-11-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45756241","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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