Animals in the American Classics: How Natural History Inspired Great Fiction, Haunted Property: Slavery and the Gothic and Writing the Mind: Social Cognition in Nineteenth-Century American Fiction

Abstract

Animals in the American Classics: How Natural History Inspired Great Fiction. Ed. John Cullen Gruesser. Texas A&M UP, 2022. 304 pp. $38.00, cloth.This is an absolutely beautiful book featuring numerous full-color illustrations including photographs, maps, naturalists’ drawings, and reproduced advertisements that portray the animals in each literary work covered. These contextual images augment strong essays, most of them centered on already well-established literary works including “The Gold-Bug,” Moby-Dick, and The Call of the Wild. John Bird’s essay on Twain’s “Jumping Frog” story exemplifies the best aspects of this approach; he focuses on the single work but brings in evidence from throughout Twain’s fiction, letters, and life. He also does an admirable job of covering the tangled publication history of rewrites and retitlings that Twain’s landmark sketch endured. Bird finds “underlying grim reality” in several of the “Jumping Frog” tale’s recounted events (116). He also notes the tale’s continued influence on art and at county fairs, concluding “Unlike much nineteenth-century American humor, ‘The Jumping Frog’ lives on” (129). Anyone teaching Twain’s sketch, from secondary-level to graduate courses, could find useful lecture content to share from Bird’s essay in this affordable, visually riveting scholarly book. Haunted Property: Slavery and the Gothic. Sarah Gilbreath Ford. UP of Mississippi, 2020. 248 pp. $110, cloth; $35, paper.Ford considers Pudd’nhead Wilson in a context spanning from Harriet Jacobs’s 1861 narrative to Natasha Tretheway’s 2006 poetry collection. Indeed, the book’s strength lies its long-view of the two topics in its subtitle (the Gothic literary tradition and U.S. slavery’s practice and legacy). That focus enables treating Twain alongside twentieth-century writers, such as Octavia Butler and Sherley Ann Williams, who are rarely connected with him. Ford builds from scholarship that foregrounds slavery’s role in defining ongoing legal and personal understandings of property ownership, and she addresses moments when fear over “loss of personhood” becomes Gothic horror. Roxy in Pudd’nhead Wilson lives such horror as someone within a system that will not “allow her to keep her son: he can either be killed, sold, or white” (85). Anyone covering Twain and the Gothic—or just curious to see Twain treated on the same page as some more recent literary giants—will find Ford’s book of high interest. Writing the Mind: Social Cognition in Nineteenth-Century American Fiction. Hannah Walser. Stanford UP, 2022. 272 pp. $60.00, cloth.Walser examines theory of mind (ToM) and the portrayal of cognition—or lack thereof—in an array of mostly antebellum books. In doing so, she complicates how we understand the truism that novels shape the way readers understand their fellow humans’ minds. When the book culminates in a study of both Huckleberry Finn and “A Double-Barreled Detective Story,” Walser focuses on a single element of social cognition: fooling, or humbug. Many studies have examined Twain’s manipulative or duplicitous characters, but Walser adds to the tradition admirably by tying it to larger understandings of “fooling” by P. T. Barnum, early-nineteenth-century French psychiatrist Jean-Étienne Esquirol, and others. For example, she notes that rather than address oath-breaking or outright lying, “Twainian deception involves skewing sensory evidence, a source in which most humans place a priori, relatively unexamined trust” (147). The chapter may help scholars wishing to scrutinize Twain’s more trickster-ish characters within the larger arena of social psychology.