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The Mark Twain Annual
Number of Followers: 2  Subscription journalISSN (Print) 1553-0981 - ISSN (Online) 1756-2597 Published by Penn State University Press  [34 journals]
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- The Stakes of Stormfield: On Mark Twain’s Vision of Heaven
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Abstract: Mark Twain’s “Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven” is not a frequent object of consideration by critics—even by Twain scholars. And when it is mentioned, typically in a footnote or critical aside, it is usually referred to in passing as a pastiche of Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’s The Gates Ajar or as simply a minor piece from his supposedly pessimistic late style. This avoidance is peculiar, however, given how strenuously and for how long Twain grappled with the story. In their indispensable collection of Twain’s writings on religion, Howard Baetzhold and Joseph McCullough note in the story’s introduction that it “holds the record for the longest period between gestation and publication—almost forty years” (129). ... Read More
PubDate: 2023-11-12T00:00:00-05:00
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- Mark Twain’s Connecticut Yankee, William Morris, and the Problem of
Late-Victorian Medievalism-
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Abstract: The central conflict of Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, between a traditionalist, hierarchical medieval society and the vulgarly democratic Hank Morgan, has long been the subject of scholarly discussion. Hank Morgan, a native of nineteenth-century Connecticut, arrives in sixth-century England and quickly uses his Enlightenment-influenced rationalism to attain power and status. He strives to establish modern systems of industry and education, presenting himself as a democratic reformer, but Twain’s attitude toward the character is ambivalent. While Hank dispels fundamentalist dogma, he is arrogant in his opposition to “the holy gloom of the Middle Ages” (87). He is arguably even ... Read More
PubDate: 2023-11-12T00:00:00-05:00
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- Mark Twain’s Early Contributions to Fantasy and Science Fiction and
“Mormon” Narratives of Reconciliation-
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Abstract: Mark Twain’s writing often shares traits with contemporary fantasy and science fiction (henceforth F&SF), particularly F&SF written by authors affiliated with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, historically referred to as “Mormons.” In particular, both Twain and these Latter-day Saint authors employ a third-way reconciliation motif that is only rarely used by writers outside the “Mormon” cultural sphere. The term “Mormon” comes from Latter-day Saints’ use of The Book of Mormon, presented to the world as a translation of ancient writings by Church founder Joseph Smith in 1830. Several Book of Mormon plot elements are mirrored in Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Author’s Court, which, “with its ... Read More
PubDate: 2023-11-12T00:00:00-05:00
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- Susy Clemens: The Final Years
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Abstract: This article considers in depth the final six years in the life of Olivia Susan Clemens, Sam and Livy Clemens’s oldest daughter, from 1890 as she prepared to enroll in Bryn Mawr College at age eighteen to her death of spinal meningitis at age twenty-four. It explores how she was developing a sense of herself in the passage from girlhood to early adulthood, and what that journey was like for her. It was not a smooth passage, nor one that has been explored in much depth. While this article does not focus on any of Twain’s creative works, or much on the man himself, I suggest that understanding more of Susy’s life provides useful insight into Twain’s character.Readers familiar with Twain biographies, with his letters ... Read More
PubDate: 2023-11-12T00:00:00-05:00
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- “Only Dead Men Can Tell the Truth in This World”: The Growth
of Mark Twain’s Anger-
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Abstract: The growth of Mark Twain’s anger over the course of his life becomes evident when one examines his body of work, particularly those texts written in the last decades of his career, through the lens of his assault on American exceptionalism. By attacking the idea of innocence from a national perspective as well as a human one, Twain illustrates the irony inherent in a theoretically Christian country. If the American experiment and the human experiment can be seen as parallels in his work, the author’s satire becomes even more biting. Mark Twain highlights the performative ignorance required to continue to believe in the national Edenic fantasy, particularly by the turn of the twentieth century.1 Connecting the ... Read More
PubDate: 2023-11-12T00:00:00-05:00
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- The Twain Doctrine
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Abstract: “Mark Twain,” said President Jimmy Carter, “had one of the greatest senses of humor, I guess, of anyone who’s ever lived in our country. He always had a good thing to say about America.” I hope, in the pages of The Mark Twain Annual, I don’t need to document how this statement is categorically false, staggeringly so. Reproval of the United States, at times constructive and other times apoplectic, is a through-line of Samuel Clemens’s work, from his earliest sketches under the byline of W. Epaminondas Adrastus Blab to his posthumously published Autobiography. While Twain did, of course, also have some “good things to say about America,” these were vastly outnumbered by the derisive, satirical, ambivalent, cynical ... Read More
PubDate: 2023-11-12T00:00:00-05:00
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- Why I Still Teach Mark Twain in the Twenty-first-Century Indian Classroom
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Abstract: Mark Twain has had a special relationship with India ever since his lecture tour of the subcontinent in 1896, which he reproduced in the travelogue Following the Equator (1897). His reputation and visibility dramatically increased in post-independence India. His works were translated in several Indian languages, introduced in literature programs in universities, and made available to young readers in abridged versions.1 The role of his writings in critiquing social justice was realized by Indian intelligentsia in the decades following India’s independence that witnessed rising inequalities based on class, caste, and region. Americanists like Prafulla C. Kar, and A. N. Kaul attuned generations of students to the ... Read More
PubDate: 2023-11-12T00:00:00-05:00
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- Comic Attack: Mark Twain and the N-word in the Classroom
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Abstract: Human Liberty—for white people—may fairly be said to be one hundred years old this year.In Fall 2019, roughly two articles per month in Inside Higher Education noted major conflicts on college campuses oriented around white supremacism, racism, and in two cases the removal of professors from the classroom for using the n-word in discussions of texts where the word itself appeared without defamatory intent. Venturing to teach one of the most important works, if not the most important, in American humor offers challenges in confronting how the humorist Mark Twain employed the word to harshly satirize American society and how we teach the analysis of his usage in the classroom. This novel, and others dealing with the ... Read More
PubDate: 2023-11-12T00:00:00-05:00
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- “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
Huckleberry Finn-
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Abstract: Late in Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, during the Wilks episode, Huck is once again in a tight place. Rather than tell a lie, his habitual move, he wonders if he should risk telling the truth. In a memorable simile, he says, “Well, I says to myself, at last, I’m agoing to chance it; I’ll up and tell the truth this time, though it does seem most like setting down on a kag of powder and touching it off, just to see where you’ll go” (239; Chap. 28). That sentiment could also apply to teaching controversial texts like Twain’s greatest novel. As my title suggests, I want to reflect on my forty years of teaching Huckleberry Finn, experiences that include highs and lows, triumphs and failures, and countless ... Read More
PubDate: 2023-11-12T00:00:00-05:00
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- Studying Mark Twain’s The Diaries of Adam and Eve from a Ghanaian
Context-
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Abstract: The idea of incorporating enactment (the process of acting out a text) as part of classroom lectures began in 2013 when our relatively young Department of Languages Education, here at Akenten Appiah-Menka University of Skills Training and Entrepreneurial Development (AAMUSTED), Kumasi, began running the English program and introduced the course, “Drama in Education.” Because there was not a readily available theatre space, and the course had a 60 percent practical component, I devised the means of short enactments in class.The use of enactment also influenced the teaching of the course “World Literature,” one of the courses in the undergraduate program for students reading English. In this course, students study ... Read More
PubDate: 2023-11-12T00:00:00-05:00
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- Mark Twain: The Final Years, 1891–1910 by Gary Scharnhorst (review)
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Abstract: 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 ... Read More
PubDate: 2023-11-12T00:00:00-05:00
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- Mark Twain’s Literary Resources: A Reconstruction of His Library and
Reading, Volume Two by Alan Gribben (review)-
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Abstract: 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 ... Read More
PubDate: 2023-11-12T00:00:00-05:00
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- Critical Insights: The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by R. Kent Rasmussen
(review)-
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Abstract: 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 ... Read More
PubDate: 2023-11-12T00:00:00-05:00
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- Mark Twain, A Horse’s Tale ed. by Charles C. Bradshaw (review)
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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 ... Read More
PubDate: 2023-11-12T00:00:00-05:00
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- Brief Reviews
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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 ... Read More
PubDate: 2023-11-12T00:00:00-05:00
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- Editor’s Re: Marks
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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 ... Read More
PubDate: 2023-11-12T00:00:00-05:00
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