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A comprehensive reading of Mark Twain's major work At the end of
his long life, Samuel Clemens felt driven to write a truthful
account of what he regarded as the flaws in his character and the
errors of his ways. His attempt to tell the unvarnished truth about
himself is preserved in nearly 250 autobiographical dictations. In
order to encourage complete veracity, he decided from the outset
that these would be published only posthumously. Nevertheless,
Clemens's autobiography is singularly unrevealing. Forrest G.
Robinson argues that, by contrast, it is in his fiction that
Clemens most fully-if often inadvertently-reveals himself. He was,
he confessed, like a cat who labors in vain to bury the waste that
he has left behind. Robinson argues that he wrote out of an
enduring need to come to terms with his remembered experiences-not
to memorialize the past, but to transform it. By all
accounts-including his own-Clemens's special curse was guilt. He
was unable to forgive himself for the deaths of those closest to
him-from his siblings' death in childhood to the deaths of his own
children. Nor could he reconcile himself to his role in the Civil
War, his part in the duel that prompted his departure from Virginia
City in 1864, and-worst of all-his sense of moral complicity in the
crimes of slavery. Tracing the theme of bad faith in all of
Clemens's major writing, but with special attention to the late
work, Robinson sheds new light on a tormented moral life. His book
challenges conventional assumptions about the humorist's
personality and creativity, directing attention to what William
Dean Howells describes as "the depths of a nature whose tragical
seriousness broke in the laughter which the unwise took for the
whole of him."
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 Twain's life and a list of suggestions for further reading.
This collection seeks to place "Pudd'nhead Wilson"--a neglected,
textually fragmented work of Mark Twain's--in the context of
contemporary critical approaches to literary studies. The editors'
introduction argues the virtues of using "Pudd'nhead Wilson" as a
teaching text, a case study in many of the issues presently
occupying literary criticism: issues of history and the uses of
history, of canon formation, of textual problematics, and finally
of race, class, and gender.
In a variety of ways the essays build arguments out of, not in
spite of, the anomalies, inconsistencies, and dead ends in the text
itself. Such wrinkles and gaps, the authors find, are the symptoms
of an inconclusive, even evasive, but culturally illuminating
struggle to confront and resolve difficult questions bearing on
race and sex. Such fresh, intellectually enriching perspectives on
the novel arise directly from the broad-based interdisciplinary
foundations provided by the participating scholars. Drawing on a
wide variety of critical methodologies, the essays place the novel
in ways that illuminate the world in which it was produced and that
further promise to stimulate further study.
"Contributors." Michael Cowan, James M. Cox, Susan Gillman, Myra
Jehlen, Wilson Carey McWilliams, George E. Marcus, Carolyn Porter,
Forrest Robinson, Michael Rogin, John Carlos Rowe, John Schaar,
Eric Sundquist
Searching out the private man as well as the public figure, this
elegantly written biography follows Henry Murray through his
discoveries and triumphs as a pioneer in the field of clinical
psychology, as a co-founder of Harvard's Psychological Clinic, the
co-inventor of the "Thematic Apperception Test," and a biographer
of Herman Melville. Murray's fascination with Melville's troubled
genius, his wartime experiences in the O.S.S., and his close
friendships with Lewis Mumford and Conrad Aiken all come to the
fore in this masterly reconstruction of a life. And always, at the
heart of this story, Robinson finds Murray's highly erotic and
mystical relationship with Christiana Morgan. "Love's Story Told"
penetrates to the heart of a brilliant figure in American
intellectual life at mid-century, as he dives deeply into the
unconscious, testing in work and love the limits of
self-exploration.
Something is not right in the world of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry
Finn. The unease is less evident to Tom, the manipulator, than to
the socially marginal Huck. The trouble is most dramatically
revealed when Huck, whose "sivilized" Christian conscience is
developing, faces the choice between betraying his black friend
Jim-which he believes is his moral duty-and letting him escape, as
his heart tells him to do. "Bad faith" is Forrest Robinson's name
for the dissonance between what we profess to believe, how we act,
and how we interpret our own behavior. There is bad faith in the
small hypocrisies of daily living, but Robinson has a much graver
issue in mind-namely slavery, which persisted for nearly a century
in a Christian republic founded on ideals of freedom, equality, and
justice. Huck, living on the fringes of small-town society,
recognizes Jim's humanity and understands the desperateness of his
plight. Yet Huck is white, a member of the dominant class; he is at
once influenced and bewildered by the contradictions of bad faith
in the minds of his fully acculturated contemporaries. Robinson
stresses that "bad faith" is more than a theme with Mark Twain; his
bleak view of man's social nature (however humorously expressed),
his nostalgia, his ambivalence about the South, his complex
relationship to his audience, can all be traced back to an
awareness of the deceits at the core of his culture-and he is not
himself immune. This deeply perceptive book will be of interest to
students of American literature and history and to anyone concerned
with moral issues.
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