Blackwell Companions to Literature and Culture

This series offers comprehensive, newly written surveys of key periods and movements and certain major authors, in English literary culture and history. Extensive volumes provide new perspectives and positions on contexts and on canonical and post-canonical texts, orientating the beginning student in new fields of study and providing the experienced undergraduate and new graduate with current and new directions, as pioneered and developed by leading scholars in the field.

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Lawrence I. Berkove is Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Michigan-Dearborn and President-elect of the Mark Twain Circle of America. He has published widely in his field of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American literature, but Twain has been a special and ongoing interest of his from the beginning. His Modern Library edition of The Best Short Stories of Mark Twain came out in 2004. Berkove is also a leading authority on the literature of the Sagebrush School of late nineteenth-century Nevada, whose members had a formative influence on Twain. He is now working on a book-length study of Twain’s religion and its influence on his literature.

John Bird is Professor of English at Winthrop University. He has published articles on Mark Twain and is the editor of the Mark Twain Circle of America’s annual publication, The Mark Twain Annual. He is completing a book on Mark Twain and metaphor.

Louis J. Budd, James B. Duke Professor (Emeritus) of English at Duke University, has concentrated on American realism and naturalism, especially as seen in the novels of William Dean Howells. He has also published steadily on the career of Mark Twain, most often as manifested in his literary reputation, popular images, and citizenship.

Martin T. Buinicki is an Assistant Professor of English at Valparaiso University, specializing in nineteenth-century American literature and the history of the book and authorship. His work has appeared in American Literary History, American Literary Realism, and the Walt Whitman Quarterly Review. His book Negotiating Copyright: Authorship and the Discourse of Literary Property Rights in Nineteenth-Century America is forthcoming from Routledge.

Gregg Camfield is Professor of English at the University of the Pacific. He is the author of Sentimental Twain: Mark Twain in the Maze of Moral Philosophy (1994), Nec essary Madness: The Humor of Domesticity in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (1997), and The Oxford Companion to Mark Twain (2003), as well as numerous articles on American literature and culture.

Mark Dawidziak is the television critic for the Cleveland Plain Dealer. A theater, film, and television reviewer for 25 years, he is the author of ten books, including Mark My Words: Mark Twain on Writing and Horton Foote’s The Shape of the River: The Lost Teleplay about Mark Twain. The founder and artistic director of northeast Ohio’s Largely Literary Theater Company, he is the author of four produced plays, including a two-act adaptation of several Twain sketches, The Reports of My Death Are Greatly Exaggerated.

Andrew Dix is a Lecturer in American Literature and Film at Loughborough University. He has co-edited Figures of Heresy: Radical Theology in English and American Writing, 1800–2000 (2005), and published journal articles and book chapters on Native American fiction, John Steinbeck, and Jonathan Raban’s travel writing. He is currently writing Beginning Film Studies for Manchester University Press.

Victor Doyno wrote on Twain’s creative processes in his Writing Mark Twain. When that book was at proof stage, the first half of the manuscript to Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (previously missing) was rediscovered. This subsequently became the subject of Beginning to Write Mark Twain, included on the CD-ROM Huck Finn: The Complete Buffalo and Erie County Public Library Manuscript. Doyno also wrote the foreword and textual addendum to the Random House Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: A Comprehensive Edition and the afterword to the “Oxford Mark Twain” edition of the novel. He is now working on Twain’s early newspaper work, 1853–68. Vic wishes to thank the editors for help in preparing his essay for publication following his recent stroke.

Shelley Fisher Fishkin is Professor of English and Director of American Studies at Stanford University. She the author of the award-winning books From Fact to Fiction: Journalism and Imaginative Writing in America (1985) and Was Huck Black? Mark Twain and African-American Voices (1993), as well as Lighting Out for the Territory: Reflections on Mark Twain and American Culture (1997). She is the editor of the 29-volume “Oxford Mark Twain” (1996), the Oxford Historical Guide to Mark Twain (2002), and “Is He Dead?” A New Comedy by Mark Twain (2003), and co-editor of Listening to Silences: New Essays in Feminist Criticism (1994), People of the Book: Thirty Scholars Reflect on their Jewish Identity (1996), The Encyclopedia of Civil Rights in America (1997), and Sport of the Gods and Other Essential Writings by Paul Laurence Dunbar (2005). She is past president of the American Studies Association and of the Mark Twain Circle of America.

Christopher Gair is Senior Lecturer in American Studies at the University of Birmingham. He is the author of Complicity and Resistance in Jack London’s Novels: From Naturalism to Nature (1997), The American Counterculture (forthcoming 2006), and numerous essays on American literature and culture. He is editor of Beyond Boundaries: C. L. R. James and Postnational Studies (forthcoming 2006) and managing editor of Symbiosis: A Journal of Anglo-American Literary Relations.

Alan Gribben was one of the three founders of the Mark Twain Circle of America, and he also helped establish the American Literature Association. Since 1991 he has chaired the English and Philosophy Department at Auburn University Montgomery, where he was named a Distinguished Research Professor in 1998. Professor Gribben writes the annual “Mark Twain” essay for American Literary Scholarship and is currently revising and updating his Mark Twain’s Library: A Reconstruction (1980).

Sam Halliday teaches Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Intellectual and Cultural History at Queen Mary, University of London. He is currently completing a book entitled Thinking Electricity: Science, Technology and Culture in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries.

Susan K. Harris is the Hall Professor of American Literature and Culture at the University of Kansas. Her publications include The Cultural Work of the 19th-Century Hostess: Annie Adams Fields and Mary Gladstone Drew (2002), The Courtship of Olivia Langdon and Mark Twain (1996), 19th-Century American Women’s Novels: Interpretive Strategies (1990), and Mark Twain’s Escape from Time: A Study of Patterns and Images (1982). She has edited Mark Twain’s Historical Romances (1994) and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (2000), as well as Stowe’s The Minister’s Wooing (1999), Sedgwick’s A New-England Tale (2003), and Wiggins’s Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm (2005).

Gavin Jones is an Associate Professor of English at Stanford University. He is the author of Strange Talk: The Politics of Dialect Literature in Gilded Age America (1999), and has published articles on George W. Cable, Theodore Dreiser, W. E. B. Du Bois, Sylvester Judd, Paule Marshall, and Herman Melville, in journals such as American Literary History, New England Quarterly, and African American Review. He is writing a book on the representation of poverty in American literature.

Holger Kersten is Professor of American Literature and Culture at the University of Magdeburg, Germany. He has presented papers and published articles on Mark Twain, Stephen Crane, Jack London, the Lewis and Clark expedition, and humor in American literature. His research interests include the use of nonstandard language in literature, national images, and nature writing.

Randall Knoper teaches English and American Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He is the author of Acting Naturally: Mark Twain in the Culture of Performance (1995) and of various essays on American literature and culture. He is working on a book about American literature and sciences of the brain and nervous system.

Leland Krauth is a Professor of English at the University of Colorado at Boulder. In addition to numerous articles on nineteenth- and twentieth-century American writers, he has published two books on Mark Twain, Proper Mark Twain (1999) and Mark Twain and Company: Six Literary Relations (2003).

James S. Leonard is Professor of English at The Citadel. He is co-editor of PrenticeHall’s two-volume Anthology of American Literature (8th edn., 2004), editor of Making Mark Twain Work in the Classroom (1999), co-editor of Satire or Evasion? Black Perspectives on Huckleberry Finn (1992), co-author of The Fluent Mundo: Wallace Stevens and the Structure of Reality (1988), editor of the Mark Twain Circular, and managing editor of The Mark Twain Annual.

Richard S. Lowry is Associate Professor of American Studies and English at the College of William and Mary. He is the author of Littery Man: Mark Twain and Modern Authorship, as well as essays on travel writing, photography, and the history of childhood. Currently he is working on a book project entitled Suffer the Children: Family, Love, and the Prehistory of Welfare.

T. J. Lustig teaches in the Department of American Studies at Keele University. He is the author of Henry James and the Ghostly (1994) and, more recently, of articles on Tim O’Brien and trauma theory. He is currently working on a study of nineteenthcentury cultural thought in Great Britain and the United States.

Jeffrey Alan Melton is an Associate Professor of English at Auburn University, Montgomery. He is the author of Mark Twain, Travel Books, and Tourism: The Tide of a Great Popular Movement (2002). He has published articles on travel literature and Mark Twain in South Atlantic Review, Papers on Language and Literature, Studies in American Humor, Popular Culture Review, Studies in American Culture, and Thalia: Studies in Literary Humor.

Peter Messent is Professor of Modern American Literature at the University of Nottingham. He is the author of New Readings of the American Novel: Narrative Theory and its Application (1990), Ernest Hemingway (1992), Mark Twain (1997), and The Short Works of Mark Twain: A Critical Study (2001). He also edited Criminal Proceedings: The Contemporary American Crime Novel (1997). He has published in many other areas of American literature and is at present working on a study of Mark Twain and male friendship.

Scott Michaelsen is Associate Professor of English at Michigan State University. With David E. Johnson, he co-edits CR: The New Centennial Review, an interdisciplinary journal of theoretical inquiry into the Americas. He is the author of The Limits of Multiculturalism: Interrogating the Origins of American Anthropology (1999) and co-editor of Border Theory: The Limits of Cultural Politics (1997).

Bruce Michelson is Professor of American Literature and Director of the Campus Honors Program at the University of Illinois. His books include Literary Wit (2000), Mark Twain on the Loose: A Comic Writer and the American Self (1995), Wilbur’s Poetry: Music in a Scattering Time (1991), and the forthcoming Mark Twain and the Information Age. He is a featured commentator in the “American Passages” video series produced by the Annenberg Foundation and Oregon Public Broadcasting, and he authors the “Instructor’s Guide” and the website for The Norton Anthology of American Literature.

Linda A. Morris is Professor of English at the University of California, Davis. In addition to articles on Dorothea Lange, Mark Twain, Mary Lasswell, and American satire, she is the author of Women Vernacular Humorists in the Nineteenth Century: Ann Stephens, Frances Whitcher, and Marietta Holley (1988); Women’s Humor in the Age of Gentility: The Life and Work of Frances M. Whitcher (1992); and American Women Humorists: Critical Essays (1994). She is currently completing a book entitled Gender Play in Mark Twain.

Cameron C. Nickels is Professor Emeritus of English and American Studies at James Madison University. Past president of the American Humor Studies Association and editor of its newsletter, he is currently writing a book on Civil War humor. He also plays in a bluegrass band.

Hilton Obenzinger writes fiction, poetry, history, and criticism. He is the author of American Palestine: Melville, Twain, and the Holy Land Mania, a literary and historical study of America’s fascination with the Holy Land, as well as A*hole, an experimental fiction, Running through Fire: How I Survived the Holocaust by Zosia Goldberg, as Told to Hilton Obenzinger (an oral history of his aunt’s ordeal during the war), Cannibal Eliot and the Lost Histories of San Francisco, a novel of invented documents that recounts the history of San Francisco to 1906, New York on Fire, a documentary poem of the history of New York City as seen through its fires, and This Passover or the Next I Will Never Be in Jerusalem, winner of the American Book Award. He teaches advanced writing and American literature at Stanford University.

Tom Quirk is Professor of English at the University of Missouri-Columbia. His publications on Mark Twain include Mark Twain: A Study of the Short Fiction (1997) and Coming to Grips with “Huckleberry Finn”: Essays on a Book, a Boy, and a Man (1993). He is the editor or compiler of Tales, Speeches, Essays, and Sketches by Mark Twain (1994), The Innocents Abroad (2002), The Penguin Portable Mark Twain (2004), and Dictionary of Literary Biography Documentary Series: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (forthcoming). He is currently writing a book with the provisional title Mark Twain and Human Nature.

Stephen Railton teaches American literature at the University of Virginia. His most recent book is Mark Twain: A Short Introduction (2003). Among his other publications are several essays on Twain, and among the online resources he has created is Mark Twain in his Times: An Electronic Archive (http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/railton).

R. Kent Rasmussen holds a Ph.D. from the University of California at Los Angeles in African history, a subject on which he has published five books. His writings on Mark Twain include Mark Twain A to Z (1995), Mark Twain’s Book for Bad Boys and Girls (1995), The Quotable Mark Twain (1997; also published as Mark Twain: His Words, Wit and Wisdom), and Mark Twain for Kids (2004). A greatly expanded edition of Mark Twain A to Z is scheduled for publication in fall 2005 as Critical Companion to Mark Twain. He is also the editor of the three-volume Cyclopedia of Literary Places (2003). Rasmussen is now a reference book editor in southern California. His interest in motion pictures goes back to his childhood, and he is now building a collection of 16mm films about Mark Twain and adapted from his works for eventual donation to a library or museum.

Forrest G. Robinson is Professor of American Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. His writings on Mark Twain include In Bad Faith: The Dynamics of Deception in Mark Twain’s America (1986) and three edited volumes: Mark Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson: Race, Conflict and Culture (1990, with Susan Gillman), The Cambridge Companion to Mark Twain (1995), and a special number of Arizona Quarterly on “Mark Twain’s Late Works,” co-edited with Shelley Fisher Fishkin and forthcoming in 2005. He is presently at work on a biographical study of his favorite American humorist.

Gary Scharnhorst is Professor of English at the University of New Mexico. He is editor of American Literary Realism, editor in alternating years of American Literary Scholarship, and general editor of the “American Literary Realism and Naturalism” monograph series published by the University of Alabama Press. He is also a former president of the Western Literature Association and former chair of the American Literature Section of the Modern Language Association.

David Lionel Smith is the John W. Chandler Professor of English at Williams College, where he is also Director of the W. Ford Schumann Performing Arts Endowment. He was editor, with Jack Salzman and Cornel West, of the Encyclopedia of African American Culture and History, and at present he is editing with Wahneema Lubiano the Blackwell Companion to African American Writing.

Peter Stoneley is a Professor in the School of English and American Literature at the University of Reading. He wrote Mark Twain and the Feminine Aesthetic (1992), and his most recent book is Consumerism and American Girls’ Literature, 1860–1940 (2003). His current projects include A Concise Companion to American Fiction, 1900–1950, which he is co-editing for Blackwell with Cindy Weinstein.

Henry B. Wonham, Professor of English at the University of Oregon, is the author of several books on American literature, including Mark Twain and the Art of the Tall Tale (1993), Charles W. Chesnutt: A Study of the Short Fiction (1998), and Playing the Races: Ethnic Caricature and American Literary Realism (2004). He is also the editor of Criticism and the Color Line: Desegregating American Literary Studies (1996) and a critical edition of Tales of Henry James (2002).

Thomas D. Zlatic received a Ph.D. in literature from St. Louis University and has published on Mark Twain in American Literature, Nineteenth-Century Literature, Clio, and Papers on Language and Literature. His essay “Mark Twain and the Art of Memory,” co-written with Thomas M. Walsh, was awarded the Foerster Prize for best article in American Literature.

Both editors dedicate this book to Gretchen Sharlow, on behalf of the many beneficiaries of her tireless, imaginative, wise, and companionable guidance of the Elmira College Center for Mark Twain Studies.

The editors would, in addition, like to acknowledge their debt to those Twain scholars who contributed to this collection. It was a genuine pleasure to work with them. The editors also thank Gillian Somerscales for her editorial assistance at manuscript stage. Her enthusiasm for the project, the quality of her work, and the speed of her responses were all very much appreciated.