Mark Twain Annual最新文献

{"title":"EDITOR’S RE: MARKS","authors":"Ben Click","doi":"10.5325/marktwaij.21.1.v","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/marktwaij.21.1.v","url":null,"abstract":"This issue marks the twentieth anniversary of The Mark Twain Annual! Like many great ideas regarding Mark Twain, the idea for this journal began over drinks and cigars. Although the story of this journal’s genesis has been retold in past issues (volumes 1 and 6), I recall it once more on its twentieth anniversary.In May 2001, at the American Literature Association Conference (ALA), on a balcony in Cambridge, Massachusetts, several members of the Mark Twain Circle gathered to socialize when John Bird openly bemoaned that no academic journal devoted to critical articles on Mark Twain existed. At that moment, the late Michael Kiskis exclaimed, “You’re right!,” turned to Bird and said, “And you’re going to be the editor!” Discussions about what the journal’s mission would be continued at the Elmira Conference that August (pedagogical essays were added as part of the annual’s mission). In May 2002, at the Circle business meeting, the name of the annual was officially voted on, and Bird was chosen as its inaugural editor, with annual publication to come every fall, starting with the first issue published in 2003.In keeping with its mission, this issue features both critical and pedagogical pieces. Our critical essays begin with Seth Murray’s new take on the oft-neglected “Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven” arguing that it is more than literary miscellany from Twain’s late writings or a caricature of Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’s religious sentimentalism; rather it is “a careful meditation on a series of questions—belief, mortality, justice, and the quest for the most humane arrangement of life.” The next two essays offer fresh insights about A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. Joshua Fagan posits that Connecticut Yankee “should be considered specifically in the context of late-Victorian, fin-de-siècle medievalism, not simply as a reaction against starry-eyed medievalists, but as a work engaging with the medievalist literature and historiography of this period.” As Alan Manning and Nicole Amare’s title states, they explore “Mark Twain’s Early Contribution to Fantasy and Science Fiction and ‘Mormon’ Narratives of Reconciliation.” They illustrate a shared thematic concern over reconciliation through transcendence as seen in the third-way reconciliation motif employed in Connecticut Yankee and The Book of Mormon. Next, Linda Morris examines letters between Susy Clemens and fellow Bryn Mawr classmate Louise Bronwell, her sister Clara, and their mother Livy. Morris’s portrait of Susy in these last six years also provides insights about Samuel Clemens as a father as well as Mark Twain’s writings (after Susy’s death) that challenged traditional gender expectations of the time.The final two essays in this section investigate the ironic and hypocritical public belief in American exceptionalism and patriotism, how Twain exposed it in his later writings, and how he was later appropriated to support it. Megan McNamara traces Twain’s efforts to undermine Ame","PeriodicalId":41060,"journal":{"name":"Mark Twain Annual","volume":"38 3","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135411048","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}

{"title":"Mark Twain’s Early Contributions to Fantasy and Science Fiction and “Mormon” Narratives of Reconciliation","authors":"Alan Manning, Nicole Amare","doi":"10.5325/marktwaij.21.1.0040","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/marktwaij.21.1.0040","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Mark Twain is best known in popular culture as the author of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. It is somewhat less widely known that he wrote on the leading edge of the writing genre we now know as Fantasy and Science Fiction (F&SF). He stands with Edgar Allan Poe, Jules Verne, and H. G. Wells as one of the early developers of basic themes that are with us still: time travel, political dystopia, alternative history, future history, ESP, alien/demonic visitation, travel to alien worlds, and world-altering inventions. Twain likewise had fictional alignments with Latter-day Saint theology, including the theme of reconciliation through transcendence. Transcendent reconciliation is thus the driving force behind the general plot strategy of the most successful examples of Latter-day Saint fantasy/sci-fi and Twain’s writings as well.","PeriodicalId":41060,"journal":{"name":"Mark Twain Annual","volume":"32 2","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135411065","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}

{"title":"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","authors":"Nathaniel Williams","doi":"10.5325/marktwaij.21.1.0170","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/marktwaij.21.1.0170","url":null,"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:","PeriodicalId":41060,"journal":{"name":"Mark Twain Annual","volume":"29 4","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135411073","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}

{"title":"The Twain Doctrine","authors":"Matt Seybold","doi":"10.5325/marktwaij.21.1.0095","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/marktwaij.21.1.0095","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract During the Cultural Cold War, and specifically during the Armed Thaw of the late 1950s and early 1960s, Mark Twain became an object of propaganda between the United States and USSR. The U.S. state–private network of intelligence agencies, corporations, media conglomerates, lobbies, and other institutions set about a process of indoctrination that converted Twain into an iconography serving national interests. While the Twain Doctrine has long since ceased to dominate Twain Studies scholarship, it still operates upon the general public. This essay surveys its precepts and gives several examples of its implementation.","PeriodicalId":41060,"journal":{"name":"Mark Twain Annual","volume":"34 3","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135411059","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}

{"title":"Mark Twain, A Horse’s Tale","authors":"Emily E. VanDette","doi":"10.5325/marktwaij.21.1.0166","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/marktwaij.21.1.0166","url":null,"abstract":"Aside from its inclusion in anthologies, Mark Twain’s last published novella has been out of print since 1907. Charles C. Bradshaw rectifies that with a long overdue, and superbly executed, critical edition of A Horse’s Tale. First published in 1906, in response to a personal request Twain received from New York actress and animal rights activist Minnie Maddern Fiske for a story condemning Spanish bullfighting, A Horse’s Tale would spend the next century in obscurity because of its unabashed sentimentality. The University of Nebraska Press’s Bison Books edition marks the official end to that era of neglect. The volume includes an illuminating introduction by Bradshaw that places the novella in its historical and biographical contexts; the novella in its entirety, along with explanatory notes and original illustrations; an afterword by Shelley Fisher Fishkin highlighting the significance of the book in the scope of Twain’s animal writing and advocacy; and an array of relevant historical materials provided in the appendix. The result is a valuable resource for scholars, teachers, and students who wish to expand their understanding of Twain’s late-career animal advocacy writing and his complex treatment of frontier tropes and culture.Given the book’s inclusion in The Papers of William F. “Buffalo Bill” Cody Series, a substantial portion of Bradshaw’s introduction focuses on the connections between “Buffalo Bill” Cody and Twain as a major context for the novella. The Cody-Twain context is nuanced, and Bradshaw deftly outlines the cultural dynamics and tensions between the two iconic American personalities. While at first applauding the “Buffalo Bill” exhibition as a distinctly American cultural project when he saw it performed in Elmira in 1884, Twain would later come to recognize (and reject) the imperialistic spectacle of the frontier presented in the show. Bradshaw notes that “Twain’s last angry exit from Madison Square Garden where Buffalo Bill’s Wild West was being performed in 1901 … projects the beginnings of both Cody’s and Twain’s frontierism toward divergent trajectories and highlights how Twain saw his nationalistic ambitions distorted into imperialistic spectacles and the worst in human nature, even as Cody patriotically embraced them in his show” (xxxvi). As Bradshaw explains, despite his abhorrence of the nationalistic spectacle generated by the “Wild West” show, Twain appreciated the cultural appeal of Buffalo Bill, and especially of his horse, Soldier Boy, which he put to the service of the book’s animal welfare aspirations.Other themes and contexts addressed in Bradshaw’s introduction include Twain’s connection to the West, childhood, and gender roles in his writing and personal life, and his famous anti-imperialism. Indeed, a frontier adventure tale with an animal-loving little girl as the protagonist ties together key facets of Twain’s legacy. “Twain’s employment of these sensationalist western motifs [popularized by Cody] brings h","PeriodicalId":41060,"journal":{"name":"Mark Twain Annual","volume":"31 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135411070","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}

{"title":"“Only Dead Men Can Tell the Truth in This World”: The Growth of Mark Twain’s Anger","authors":"Megan McNamara","doi":"10.5325/marktwaij.21.1.0080","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/marktwaij.21.1.0080","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract As the writer known as Mark Twain neared the end of his life and career, the changing circumstances of the nation caused his criticism to sharpen and move from somewhat covert to brutally overt. The ways in which American nationalism and false piety were becoming ever more entwined seemed to have led to an increased infusion of anger within his satire. In the last decade of his life, his satire of American exceptionalism grew sharper with the “The War Prayer” and “To the Person Sitting in Darkness.” The latter, originally an essay published in the North American Review in February 1901 satirizing imperialism, religion, and the myth of American innocence, was published just a month after the writer had been appointed the vice-president of the Anti-Imperialist League of New York. His disappointment, to put it mildly, at the American involvement in the Philippines and China has been well documented, but in these pieces Mark Twain attacks the Christian missionary zeal that is used as a cover for capitalism and imperialism abroad. Through his scathing response to Reverend William Scott Ament, the article instantiates his growth, with some of his most scathing and direct criticism of the missionary project and its connections with imperialist capitalism. With his latest works, Mark Twain suggests that if only Americans were able to unlearn their inherited mythologies, they might be able to avoid the most atrocious outcroppings of patriotism and Christianity.","PeriodicalId":41060,"journal":{"name":"Mark Twain Annual","volume":"35 3","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135411057","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}

{"title":"“WHY WE SHOULD ANNEX”: Reprints and Repercussions of Twain’s New York Tribune Letters on Hawai‘i","authors":"T. Thompson","doi":"10.5325/marktwaij.20.1.0053","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/marktwaij.20.1.0053","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:The December 1872 death of Hawaiian monarch Kamehameha V spurred renewed interest among U.S. citizens and politicians alike in the annexation of the Hawaiian Islands. To satisfy the public’s increased curiosity about Hawai‘i, in January 1873 the New York Tribune sought testimony in the form of two letters from a well-known expert on the islands: Mark Twain, who had gained nationwide fame based his popular comic lecture “Our Fellow Savages of the Sandwich Islands,” which he delivered across the United States and abroad between 1866 and 1873. Between January and March of 1873 at least seventy newspapers and magazines reprinted excerpts of Mark Twain’s Tribune letters. This article considers how these reprinted excerpts decontextualize or mischaracterize Mark Twain’s insights as well as what they reveal about the American reading public’s views of Mark Twain as both a comedian and as a serious expert on Hawai‘i in the early 1870s.","PeriodicalId":41060,"journal":{"name":"Mark Twain Annual","volume":"20 1","pages":"53 - 69"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2022-09-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46070659","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}

{"title":"The Terra Comica between Mark Twain and Sherman Alexie","authors":"Myrial Adel Holbrook","doi":"10.5325/marktwaij.20.1.0130","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/marktwaij.20.1.0130","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Mark Twain and Sherman Alexie are at once an unlikely and a likely duo. A vast gulf of time, culture, and heritage separates them. What likens them is their shared celebrity status and iconic, irreverent humor. This paper undertakes a comparison between Twain and Alexie, not to diminish the important and idiosyncratic role of Native American humor, but rather to bring it into conversation with white humor, perhaps approaching a multiplex American humor. A comparison of two of their early works, Roughing It for Twain and The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven for Alexie, to illuminate the ways in which both authors eschew the physical terrain of the West, instead monumentalizing a cacophonous, comical verbal landscape. Both authors, as public figures, also raise questions of what it means to monumentalize authors, and this paper gestures toward that dual pitfall and potential.","PeriodicalId":41060,"journal":{"name":"Mark Twain Annual","volume":"20 1","pages":"130 - 142"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2022-09-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42637440","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}

{"title":"Political Corruption and Mark Twain’s West","authors":"A. Hebard","doi":"10.5325/marktwaij.20.1.0174","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/marktwaij.20.1.0174","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This article argues that Mark Twain’s West was a bureaucratically managed space and that his depictions of western institutions reveal forms of political corruption that are not venal. Unlike the corruption that the Supreme Court has recently limited to quid pro quo exchanges of money for political favors by individuals, the corruption that Twain reveals through the lens of his western experiences is endemic to institutions and can often involve well-meaning individuals who are not acting in criminal ways.","PeriodicalId":41060,"journal":{"name":"Mark Twain Annual","volume":"20 1","pages":"174 - 189"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2022-09-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45849017","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}

{"title":"The California and Hawaii Notebooks: Pencils, Pocket Notebooks, and the Messiness of Mark Twain","authors":"Blake Bronson-Bartlett","doi":"10.5325/marktwaij.20.1.0070","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/marktwaij.20.1.0070","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This article is about Clemens’s early California and Hawaii notebooks (Notebooks IV–VI, Jan. 1865–Apr. 1866), which he used during the period recounted years later in approximately the last quarter of Roughing It. An illustrated reading of the notebook makes three general points: first, that Clemens used pocket notebooks and graphite pencils (the mid-nineteenth-century’s portable media) to train himself to write down experience as he saw and heard it; second, that the traces left by this training process were (and are) ironic, because they visibly and comically fail to capture experience; and third, that Clemens referred to the notebooks throughout his career for their evocative gestures (as much if not more than the linguistic contents). Following readings of the notebooks that are grounded in graphite traces and their multiple afterlives in print, this article concludes by hailing their forthcoming publication online, where other scholars and general readership will be able to see their traces.","PeriodicalId":41060,"journal":{"name":"Mark Twain Annual","volume":"20 1","pages":"70 - 87"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2022-09-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48722070","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}