The Mercurial Mark Twains(s) examines the way Twain, his texts, and his image have been constructed by common readers, reviewers, and Twain scholars, as well as film and television adaptations. This study provides the first fine-grained historical analysis of nearly 150 years of his reception in both the public and private spheres

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.

Preface

Part 1

Chapter 1: Twain's Early Reception: The Humorist and More

Chapter 2: Notorious Celebrity: From Tom Sawyer to Huckleberry Finn

Chapter 3: Vintage Variations and New Mark Twains, 1889-1899

Chapter 4: The Final Decade: From Celebrity Polemicist to Mercurial Icon

Part 2

Chapter 5: Twain's Early Afterlives, 1910-1939

Chapter 6: Old Twains, New Twains, and Fresh Controversies: Race, Myth, Adaptations, and the

Cold War, 1940-1959

Chapter 7: Texts, Politics, and Hypercanonization: Corpus, Canon, and Significances in the

1960s and 1970s

Chapter 8: Ever-Changing Marks: Shaping Twain by Century's End

Notes

Index