Mark Twain, American Humorist

Tracy Wuster

• Publisher: University of Missouri
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780826221995, 9780826220561
• eBook ISBN: 9780826274113
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Mark Twain, American Humorist examines the ways that Mark Twain's reputation developed at home and abroad in the period between 1865 and 1882, years in which he went from a regional humorist to national and international fame. In the late 1860s, Mark Twain became the exemplar of a school of humor that was thought to be uniquely American. As he moved into more respectable venues in the 1870s, especially through the promotion of William Dean Howells in the Atlantic Monthly, Mark Twain muddied the hierarchical distinctions between class-appropriate leisure and burgeoning forms of mass entertainment, between uplifting humor and debased laughter, and between the literature of high culture and the passing whim of the merely popular.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Abbreviations
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction. Setting the Scene: Mark Twain, the American Humorist
• Chapter One. “Of a low order—i.e. humorous”: American Humor and the Meanings of Mark Twain
• Chapter Two. An American Birth Abroad: The Innocents Abroad and American Humor
• Chapter Three. “The Company of the Best”: Phunny Phellow in the Atlantic Monthly
• Chapter Four. A Worried Mother: Mark Twain and the Circulation of the Humorist
• Chapter Five. Transatlantic Twain: The Lion in London and Other “Great American Humorists”
• Chapter Six. “There’s Millions In It!”: Mark Twain and the Business of Satire in the Gilded Age
• Chapter Seven. The Stripèd Humorist: Mark Twain Makes Waves in the Atlantic’s Ocean
• Conclusion. “The Most Popular Humorist Who Ever Lived”: The Transformations of Mark Twain
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index of Works
• Index of Subjects