Mercurial Mark Twain(s)

James L. Machor is an Emeritus Professor of English at Kansas State University. He is the author of Reading Fiction in Antebellum America: Informed Response and Reception Histories, 1820-1865 (2011) and Pastoral Cities: Urban Ideals and the Symbolic Landscape of America (1987). He has edited Readers in History: Nineteenth-Century American Literature and the Contexts of Response (1993) and co-edited Reception Study: From Literary Theory to Cultural Studies (2001) and New Directions in American Reception Study (2008). He is also the senior co-editor of Reception: Texts, Readers, Audiences, History, the peer-reviewed journal of the Reception Study Society.

• PrefacePart 1Chapter 1: Twain’s Early Reception: The Humorist and MoreChapter 2: Notorious Celebrity: From Tom Sawyer to Huckleberry FinnChapter 3: Vintage Variations and New Mark Twains, 1889-1899Chapter 4: The Final Decade: From Celebrity Polemicist to Mercurial IconPart 2Chapter 5: Twain’s Early Afterlives, 1910-1939Chapter 6: Old Twains, New Twains, and Fresh Controversies: Race, Myth, Adaptations, and the Cold War, 1940-1959Chapter 7: Texts, Politics, and Hypercanonization: Corpus, Canon, and Significances in the 1960s and 1970sChapter 8: Ever-Changing Marks: Shaping Twain by Century’s EndNotesIndex

Numerous scholars have chronicled how book reviewers and other cultural commentators responded to Twain and his works both before and after his death in 1910. Recently, there has been increasing interest in how less-elite readers responded to Twain’s writings and in how Twain’s popular and critical reputations were forged in the 20th century. Prominent examples of such scholarship are Dear Mark Twain: Letters from His Readers, ed. by R. Kent Rasmussen (2013); Robert McParland’s Mark Twain’s Audience: A Critical Analysis of Reader Responses to the Writings of Mark Twain (2014); and Joe Fulton’s Mark Twain Under Fire: Reception and Reputation, Criticism and Controversy, 1851–2015 (2016). Machor wisely does not attempt a comprehensive study of Twain’s reception, instead presenting an extremely readable, broad overview of how Twain and his books (excluding serialized versions, translations, and pirated editions) have been received by particular audiences, chiefly American and British. Incorporating many more of the fan letters written to Twain during his lifetime than previous scholars have, convincingly refuting a number of previous scholarly assertions, and offering persuasive analyses, this study should prove very useful for years to come. Summing Up: Highly Recommended.--C. Johanningsmeier, University of Nebraska at Omaha