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Dark Twins - Imposture and Identity in Mark Twain's America (Paperback, 2nd ed.)
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Dark Twins - Imposture and Identity in Mark Twain's America (Paperback, 2nd ed.)
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"Many persons have such a horror of being taken in," wrote P. T.
Barnum, "that they believe themselves to be a sham and are
continually humbugging themselves." Mark Twain enjoyed trading on
that horror, as the many confidence men, assumed identities, and
disguised characters in his fiction attest. In Dark Twins, Susan
Gillman challenges the widely held assumption that Twain's concern
with identity is purely biographical and argues that what has been
regarded as a problem of individual psychology must be located
instead within American society around the turn of the century.
Drawing on Twain's whole writing career, but focusing on the
controversial late period of social "pessimism" and literary
"incoherence," Gillman situates Twain and his work in historical
context, demonstrating the complex interplay between his most
intimate personal and authorial identity and the public attitudes
toward race, gender, and science.
Gillman shows that laws regulating race classification, paternity,
and rape cases underwrite Twain's critical exploration of racial
and sexual difference in the writings of the 1890s and after, most
strikingly in the little-known manuscripts that Gillman calls the
"tales of transvestism." The "pseudoscience" of spiritualism and
the "science" of psychology provide the cultural vocabularies
essential to Twain's fantasy and science fiction writings of his
last two decades. Twain stands forth finally as a representative
man, not only a child of his culture, but also as one implicated in
a continuing American anxiety about freedom, race, and identity.
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