As Mark Twain, Samuel Clemens straddled the conflicts between culture and commerce that characterized the era he named the Gilded Age. In "Littery Man", Richard Lowry examines how Twain used these conflicts in his major texts to fashion an "autobiography of authorship," a narrative of his own claims to literary authority at that moment when the American Writer emerged as a profession. Drawing on wide range of cultural genres--popular boys' fiction, childbearing manuals, travel narratives, autobiography, and criticism and fiction of the period--Lowry reconstructs how Twain participated in remaking the "literary" into a powerful social category of representation. He shows how, as one of our cultures first modern celebrities, Samuel Clemens transformed his life into the artful performance we have come to know as Mark Twain, and his texts into a searching critique of modern identity in a mass-mediated society. "Littery Man" will appeal to both Twain scholars and to scholars and students of nineteenth-century American literature and culture.
Author(s): Richard S. Lowry
Year: 1996
Language: English
Pages: 192
Contents......Page 10
INTRODUCTION: Mark Twain's Autobiographies of Authorship......Page 14
I. "The Sole Form"......Page 27
II. Literary Reverence: The Whittier Birthday Banquet......Page 35
III. Local Differences......Page 48
I. Speculating in the Market......Page 55
II. Siteless Sights: The Innocents Abroad......Page 62
III. The Magic of Composition: Roughing It......Page 76
I. Nostalgia and Play......Page 87
II. Rightly Constructing Boys......Page 101
III. Fracturing: Injun Joe......Page 111
I. On the Verge of Authorship......Page 123
II. Autobiography and the Making of the Literate Author......Page 132
III. Fighting Words......Page 146
Coda: "Speaking from the Grave"......Page 159
Notes......Page 162
B......Page 184
H......Page 185
P......Page 186
T......Page 187
Z......Page 188
