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WorksLighting Out for the Territory: Reflections on Mark Twain and American Culture
From Publishers Weekly Certain literary scholars reach a point in their careers when they earn enough distinction in their field to write something other than literary criticism. Fishkin, lifelong Twain scholar, is just such a scholar. In her previous volume, Was Huck Black?, Fishkin boldly argued for the influence of African American voices on Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Here, she has produced a collection of essays that is one part American history, one part literary criticism and two parts travelogue. Drawing on America's geography and popular culture for background, Fishkin revisits her earlier work from the perspective of a stranger in a strange land-the "world of Twain" as it exists in America today. In her first essay, Fishkin describes with biting irony her visit to Hannibal, Mo., Twain's birthplace, which is now a tourist trap, and the obliviousness of Hannibal's citizens to Twain's darker views on Southern racism. In her second, she visits the abolitionist town of Elmira, N.Y. in an attempt to understand why Twain's residence there changed his views on race. In the third, she takes up Twain's popular presence in film, modern novels and on stage. Fishkin is fascinating and cogent throughout: tough on censorship, soft on Twain, Fishkin's book is a call to arms that we not forget America's history of racism by banning from our classrooms one of the few authors who wrote about it with honesty and clarity. From Library Journal In these three essays and long epilog, Fishkin (Was Huck Black?, LJ 4/1/93), whose recent discovery that Twain modeled Huckleberry Finn's voice after a black boy's made news beyond the academic world, discusses how Americans have, for nearly a century, appropriated Twain for a multitude of their own purposes. In doing so, she argues, they distort the work of the author and his often troublesome beliefs. Twain is everywhere in American culture, from "Tom Sawyer's Island" in Disneyland, to the name of Missouri banks, to Hal Holbrook's meticulous impersonation, "Mark Twain Tonight." Often, however, we are guilty of seeing only the Twain with whom we feel comfortable. His hometown of Hannibal, Missouri, for instance, which derives millions from tourists, glosses over the antislavery core of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn to construct an appealing (and lucrative) but historically fraudulent picture of a haven for white childhood innocence. Jargon-free and reader-friendly, Fishkin's personal narrative is recommended for all libraries. The Oxford Mark Twain
"The Oxford Mark Twain is the uniform edition that Twain himself sought to produce in his old age...Every lending library in the English-speaking world should stock them."--The New Statesman "The great advantage of a collected edition is that it's full of unexplored territory where you can make discoveries (or narrow escapes, in some cases). Savor the original illustrations. Each of these 29 volumes contains a reproduction of an original first edition published during Twain's lifetime. The authentic imitations are sandwiched between lively introductions by mostly famous writers, including Toni Morrison, Kurt Vonnegut, and Gore Vidal."--EntertainmentWeekly.com * Features forewords from numerous literary luminaries, including Kurt Vonnegut, E.L. Doctorow, Ursula Le Guin, and Arthur Miller, to name just a few. * Each volume concludes with an afterword by a noteworthy Twain scholar * Provides original facsimiles of the works as they were first published, including charming original illustrations. Feminist Engagements: Forays into American Literature and Culture
A CHOICE OUTSTANDING ACADEMIC TITLE "These 'forays' are excellent examples of second-wave feminist scholarship... Highly recommended to all readers." --CHOICE "This book is excitingly, intellectually engaged and, at the same time, movingly self-revelatory. Every page is to be savored." --Annette Kolodny, Professor Emerita of American Literature and Culture, University of Arizona and author of The Lay of the Land “Because she has an appreciation of humor and of writing from the undergrounds of race, class, and gender, Shelley Fisher Fishkin is the perfect person to meditate on the contributions of black and Latino writers, unsung women writers, and those who transgress the conventional boundaries of literature. Her book is enormously valuable and great fun to read.” —Erica Jong, poet and novelist, author of twenty-two books including Love Comes First “Shelley Fisher Fishkin gives us a spirited and personal account of her coming to feminism, of the mentors who inspired her and the shifts in methodology and perspective her feminist engagements have provoked in her critical work. Feminism, for Fishkin, is a way of reading—American literature by women and men, popular culture, and, most engagingly, humor—that leads to a reconceptualization of American Studies by one of its foremost scholars.” --Marianne Hirsch, Co-Director, Institute for Research on Women and Gender, Columbia University Mark Twain’s Book of Animals
"Damn near flawless.... The perfect holiday gift-book.... Mark Twain's Book of Animals serves its readers up America's greatest humorist in all his moods–serious, knee-slapping, crusading, sentimental, etc. The key common note is that wonderful, inimitable voice we all know as if by instinct.... Any intelligently edited new Twain collection is always a welcome thing, and this volume is one of the best. Readers are urged not to miss it." —Open Letters The Mark Twain Anthology: Great Writers on His Life and Works
For William Dean Howells, Mark Twain was “the Lincoln of our literature”; for William Faulkner, he was “the first truly American writer,” and for Eugene O’Neill, “the true father of American literature.” Ernest Hemingway famously asserted that “all modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn.” During his lifetime and in the hundred years since his death, Mark Twain has been one of the most beloved and widely read of authors, not just in America but around the world. He has been especially cherished by other writers, who have drawn inspiration from many different aspects of his work. The range of voices is extraordinarily diverse, a tribute to the diversity and complexity of Twain’s art. During his lifetime Twain was reviewed, interviewed, and assessed by writers as different as Lafcadio Hearn, José Martí, Rudyard Kipling, and George Bernard Shaw. They were joined, in the century that followed, by G. K. Chesterton, H. L. Mencken, Jorge Luis Borges, Theodore Dreiser, George Orwell, T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, Ralph Ellison, and many others, with recent commentary by David Bradley, Erica Jong, Toni Morrison, Gore Vidal, Kurt Vonnegut, Dick Gregory, Min Jin Lee, and Roy Blount Jr. Of special interest is Twain’s international impact. The Mark Twain Anthology presents a broad selection of responses to Twain from Europe, Asia, and Latin America, many of the pieces translated for the first time. The book also includes a selection of visual tributes to Twain (by artists ranging from James Montgomery Flagg to Jean Cocteau to Chuck Jones) and a sampler of shorter comments by individuals as varied as Friedrich Nietzsche, Harry S. Truman, Richard Pryor, Gertrude Stein, and Charles Darwin. |
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