ISBN: d4a2e3a60f2568357aa6dae7e87a5fcb

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 editor… More...

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 Duke University Press Books North American Literary Criticism 9780822310464, AU,DE,ES,FR,GB,UK,IT,MX,US English Literature, Duke University Press<

ISBN: d4a2e3a60f2568357aa6dae7e87a5fcb

When a murder takes place in Dawson's Landing, Missouri, the lives of twin Italian noblemen, the courageous slave Roxy, her 1/32nd "black" son who has been raised "white, " and a failing … More...

When a murder takes place in Dawson's Landing, Missouri, the lives of twin Italian noblemen, the courageous slave Roxy, her 1/32nd "black" son who has been raised "white, " and a failing lawyer with an intense interest in the science of fingerprinting become tangled. The unsolved riddle at the heart of Pudd'nhead Wilson is less the identity of the murderer than it is the question of whether nature or nurture makes the man. In his introduction, Werner Sollors illuminates the complex web of uncertainty that is the switched-and-doubled-identity world of Twain's novel. This edition follows the text of the 1899 De Luxe edition and for the first time reprints all the E. W. Kemble illustrations that accompanied it.Since 1959 The John Harvard Library has been instrumental in publishing essential American writings in authoritative editions. Belknap Press Classics , AU,DE,ES,FR,GB,UK,IT,MX,US English Literature, Harvard University Press<