Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- List of abbreviations
- Introduction: Bearing the Double-Cross
- 1 Mark Twain's Big Two-Hearted River Text: “Old Times on the Mississippi” and Life on the Mississippi
- 2 Catching Mark Twain's Drift: The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
- 3 Reinventing and Circumventing History: The Prince and the Pauper and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court
- 4 Twaining Is Everything: The American Claimant and Pudd'nhead Wilson
- Epilogue: After the Double-Cross
- Notes
- Index
Introduction: Bearing the Double-Cross
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 September 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- List of abbreviations
- Introduction: Bearing the Double-Cross
- 1 Mark Twain's Big Two-Hearted River Text: “Old Times on the Mississippi” and Life on the Mississippi
- 2 Catching Mark Twain's Drift: The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
- 3 Reinventing and Circumventing History: The Prince and the Pauper and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court
- 4 Twaining Is Everything: The American Claimant and Pudd'nhead Wilson
- Epilogue: After the Double-Cross
- Notes
- Index
Summary
The novel is a prose narrative of some length that has something wrong with it.
– Randall Jarrell, “An Unread Book”The novel and the romance,… these clumsy separations appear to me to have been made by critics and readers for their own convenience, and to help them out of some of their occasional queer predicaments, but to have little reality or interest for the producer, from whose point of view it is of course that we are attempting to consider the art of fiction.
– Henry James, The Art of FictionAmerica is a trap: its promises and dreams … are too much to live up to and too much to escape.
– Greil Marcus, Mystery TrainUnder the shadow of epigraphs declaring that the novel, literary criticism, and America are all plagued by “something wrong,” what I am about to undertake might seem doomed from the start. For if these claims are true, then to attempt literary criticism on the novels of the writer most identified with America is to have my work cut out for me. Nonetheless, in my view, the something wrong in Mark Twain's novels is something worth investigating.
In part, the something wrong in Twain's work stems from the characteristic doubleness operating at every level of his literary conception, which in turn inspired and thwarted every project he undertook. The crucial term in the Twainishness that informs his texts and persona is authority.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Mark Twain and the NovelThe Double-Cross of Authority, pp. 1 - 13Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1998