Twain Mark - The Cambridge Companion to Mark Twain

A collaborative project assembled by scholars who have played crucial roles in the recent explosion of Twain criticism, The Cambridge Companion to Mark Twain offers new and thought-provoking essays on an author of enduring preeminence in the American canon. Accessible enough to interest both experienced specialists and students new to Twain criticism, the essays examine Twain from a wide variety of critical perspectives and include timely reflections by major critics on the hotly debated dynamics of race and slavery perceptible throughout his writing.

The volume includes a chronology of Twains life and a list of suggestions for further reading, to provide the student or general reader with sources for background as well as additional information.

THE CAMBRIDGE COMPANION TO

MARK TWAIN

THE CAMBRIDGE COMPANION TO

MARK TWAIN

EDITED BY

FORREST G. ROBINSON

University of California, Santa Cruz

Published by the Press Syndicate of the University of Cambridge

The Pitt Building, Trumpington Street, Cambridge CB2 IRP

40 West 20th Street, New York, NY 10011-4211, USA

10 Stamford Road, Oakleigh, Melbourne 3166, Australia

Cambridge University Press 1995

First published 1995

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

The Cambridge companion to Mark Twain / edited by Forrest G. Robinson,

p. cm. (Cambridge companions to literature)

Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.

ISBN 0-521-44036-X. ISBN 0-521-44593-0 (pbk.)

1. Twain, Mark, 18351910 Criticism and interpretation.

I. Robinson, Forrest G. (Forrest Glen), 1940 . II. Series.

PS1338.C36 1995

818'.409 dc20 9424658

CIP

A catalog record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 0-521-44036-x Hardback

ISBN 0-521-44593-0 Paperback

Transferred to digital printing 2003

FOR EMMA-CHAN

CONTRIBUTORS

STANLEY BRODWIN is Professor of English at Hofstra University. He has published articles on nineteenth-century American authors primarily, but especially on Mark Twain and his theological imagination. He is co-editor, with Amritjit Singh and William S. Shiver, of The Harlem Renaissance: Reevaluations (Garland Publishers, 1989); co-editor, with Michael DInnocenzo, and contributor to William Cullen Bryant and His America (AMS Press, 1983); and editor of The Old and New World Romanticism of Washington Irving (Greenwood Press, 1986).

LOUIS J. BUDD is James B. Duke Professor Emeritus of English at Duke University. His books include Mark Twain: Social Philosopher (Indiana University Press, 1962) and Our Mark Twain: The Making of His Public Personality (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983); his edited books include New Essays on Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Cambridge University Press, 1985).

EVAN CARTON is Professor of English at the University of Texas at Austin. He is the author of The Rhetoric of American Romance (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985) and The Marble Faun: Hawthornes Transformations (Twayne Publishers, 1992). He has co-authored, with Gerald Graff, a forthcoming volume, Criticism Since 1940, in the new Cambridge History of American Literature and is writing a book on contemporary American literature, politics, and pedagogy.

SHELLEY FISHER FISHKIN is Professor of American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. She is the author of Was Huck Black? Mark Twain and African-American Voices (Oxford University Press, 1993) and From Fact to Fiction: Journalism and Imaginative Writing in America (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985; Oxford University Press, 1988). She is co-editor, with Elaine Hedges, of Listening to Silences: New Essays in Feminist Criticism (Oxford University Press, 1994) and Executive Director of the Charlotte Perkins Gilman Society. Current projects include serving as editor of the forthcoming multivolume set The Oxford Mark Twain.

SUSAN GILLMAN is Associate Professor of Literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is the author of Dark Twins: Imposture and Identity in Mark Twains America (University of Chicago Press, 1989) and co-editor, with Forrest G. Robinson, of Mark Twains Puddnhead Wilson: Race, Conflict, and Culture (Duke University Press, 1990). She is currently working on a book entitled The American Race Melodramas, 18771915.

MYRA JEHLEN is Board of Governors Professor of Literature at Rutgers University. Among her writings are The Literature of Colonization in the new Cambridge Literary History of the United States and American Incarnation: The Individual, the Nation and the Continent (Harvard University Press, 1986). She is also editor, most recently, of Melville in the series New Century Views.

ERIC LOTT teaches American Studies at the University of Virginia. He is the author of Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (Oxford University Press, 1993), and his work on the racial politics of culture has appeared in American Quarterly, Representations, the Village Voice, and the Nation.

FORREST G. ROBINSON is Professor of American Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. His books include The Shape of Things Known: Sidneys Apology in Its Philosophical Tradition (Harvard University Press, 1972), In Bad Faith: The Dynamics of Deception in Mark Twains America (Harvard University Press, 1986), Loves Story Told: A Life of Henry A. Murray (Harvard University Press, 1992), and Having It Both Ways: Self-Subversion in Western Popular Classics (New Mexico University Press, 1993).

JOHN CARLOS ROWE teaches the literatures and cultures of the United States and contemporary critical theories at the University of California, Irvine, where he is also the Director of the Critical Theory Institute. He is the author of Henry Adams and Henry James (Cornell University Press, 1976), Through the Custom House (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), and The Theoretical Dimensions of Henry James (University of Wisconsin Press, 1984). He has co-edited, with Rick Berg, The Vietnam War and American Culture (Columbia University Press, 1991).

NEIL SCHMITZ is Professor of English at the State University of New York, Buffalo. He is the author of Of Huck and Alice: Humorous Writing in American Literature (University of Minnesota Press, 1983). Recent essays on Abraham Lincoln, Black Hawk, and Gertrude Stein have appeared in the Arizona Quarterly, American Literary History, and American Literature. He is completing a book on Civil War writing.

DAVID LIONEL SMITH is Professor of English and Chair of Afro-American Studies at Williams College. He has published articles on literary theory, the black arts movement, Southern literature, and Mark Twain. He is co-editor, with Jack Salzman and Cornel West, of The Encyclopedia of African-American Culture and History, forthcoming from Macmillan, and he is completing Racial Writing, Black and White, a study of how American writers have constructed accounts of racial identity.

PREFACE

In the 1939 Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer production of Huckleberry Finn, starring Mickey Rooney in the title role, much is made of the fact that Jim (played by Rex Ingram) conceals from Huck that pap is dead. When Jim asks what he would do in the event of his fathers death, Huck replies that he would return to St. Petersburg and that he would take the runaway slave back with him. Jims worst fears are thus confirmed. The white boys sole motive for fleeing downriver is fear of his father. Jim is acceptable as a companion, but Huck is hardly an abolitionist and would dutifully restore the slave to Miss Watson were the way clear to his doing so. Later, when Jim at last tells the truth about pap, Huck calls him an ungrateful thing and runs away in anger. Though we are finally brought around to the obligatory happy ending, this old movie nonetheless brings us closer to tragedy than any of the more recent popular productions of the story.