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