The man who was Mark Twain : images and ideologies /
Guy Cardwell.
- New Haven : Yale University Press, c1991.
- xv, 267 pages : illustrations ; 25 cm.
Includes bibliographical references (p. 229-260) and index.
The Critical Battleground An Adam from the Western Garden Affines and Business Art and Money Olivia, Gender, and Taste Sexuality and the Clemenses Impotence and Pedophilia Tendentious Jokes Racism and Huckleberry Finn A World Turned Upside Down Myths, Paradoxes, and the Bourgeois Hero
In this revisionist biography of Mark Twain, Cardwell redraws the diverging portraits of public figure and private man, and seeks to explain the ideological biases that have shaped the iconographic estimation of Twain as an American eidolon. He argues that critics displaced the man who was Mark Twain with an image they constructed to serve their own views of American culture. Examining Clemens' attitudes toward pastoralism and technology, art and money, frontier and genteel societies, and gender, sexuality, and race, Cardwell finds not simply a different figure form the mythic Twain but a deeply troubled man. He presents Twain as a "gravely flawed American talent," a "culturally marginal man," and often "bitter, destructive, sadistic" in his writing and private life. Other topics include W.D. Howells' role in the cultural apothesis of Twain as the "Lincoln of Our Literature.
0300049501 9780300049503
90048630
Twain, Mark, 1835-1910 --Political and social views. Twain, Mark, 1835-1910 --Psychology. Twain, Mark, 1835-1910 Twain, Mark, 1835-1910 --Puntos de vista políticos y sociales
Authors, American--Psychology.--19th century Social problems in literature. Autores estadounidenses --Siglo XIX Problemas sociales en la literatura