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Baylor BU English Faculty Publications Mark Twain Under Fire
  • Adjunct and Post-Doc Professors
  • Publications
    • 102 Days of Lying About Lauren
    • Bastille Day
    • The Interpretation of Owls
    • James Joyce and Samaritan Hospitality
    • Literacy in a Long Blues Note
    • Modernity, Community, and Place in Brian Friel's Drama
    • Modernist Authorship and Transatlantic Periodical Culture
    • A Fire to Light Our Tongues
    • Hollow Palaces
    • Haunted Property
    • American Literary Cultures
    • Sacred Rhetorical Education in 19th Century America
    • Modernism in the Green
    • A Long, Long Way
    • Hope and Aesthetic Utility in Modernist Literature
    • The Courage to See
    • The Evil Twins of American Television
    • Harvest Bells
    • Letters of a Long Name
    • Constructing Nineteenth-Century Religion
    • Reforming Women
    • Thomas Hoccleve
    • Mark Twain Under Fire
    • Building Natures
    • Understanding Marilynne Robinson
    • Living with the Living Dead
    • The Life Group
    • Then Winter
    • Building Jerusalem
    • The Divine Face in Four Writers
    • Seamus Heaney: An Introduction
    • Imagined Spiritual Communities in Britain's Age of Print
    • Housework and Gender in American Television
    • The Boke of the Cyte of Ladyes
    • Entertaining Judgment
    • Seamus Heaney's Regions
    • Elegy on Kinderklavier
    • Tracing Southern Storytelling in Black and White
    • Mapping Christian Rhetorics
    • The Tulip-Flame
    • The Glyph and the Gramophone
    • The Prodigal
    • Beyond the Pulpit
    • The Reconstruction of Mark Twain
    • Sylvia Plath's Fiction

Mark Twain Under Fire

Reception and Reputation, Criticism and Controversy, 1851-2015

Joe B. Fulton, Professor of English

Threatened by a rival editor brandishing a double-barreled shotgun, young Samuel Clemens had his first taste of literary criticism. Clemens began his long writing career penning satirical articles for his brother's newspaper in Hannibal, Missouri. His humor delighted everyone except his targets, and it would not be the last time his writing provoked threats of "dissection, tomahawking, libel, and getting his head shot off." Clemens adopted the name Mark Twain while living in the Nevada Territory, where his caustic comedy led to angry confrontations, a challenge to a duel, and a subsequent flight. Nursing his wounded ego in California, Twain vowed to develop a reputation that would "stand fire" and in the process became the classic American writer.

Mark Twain Under Fire tracks the genesis and evolution of Twain's reputation as a writer: his reception as a humorist, his "return fire" on genteel critics, and the development of academic criticism. As a history of Twain criticism, the book draws on English and foreign-language scholarship. Fulton discusses the forces and ideas that have influenced criticism, revealing how and why Mark Twain has been "under fire" from the advent of his career to the present day, when his masterpiece Huckleberry Finn remains one of America's most frequently banned books.

Camden House, 2016

Boydell & Brewer, 2018

ISBN 9781640140349


"Very few will think back to the initial reception of Twain's earliest newspaper writings, where this book begins. Fulton begins with those earliest writings and their reception, and explains how Twain's reputation evolved during his lifetime, and how his reputation continued to evolve as his writings attracted more serious criticism. He digs deep into many of the controversies that have followed ever since, producing a reliable and comprehensive survey of Mark Twain criticism." —Kevin MacDonnell, the Mark Twain Forum

English

College of Arts & Sciences

Carroll Science 106

Department of English
One Bear Place, #97404
Waco, TX 76798-7404

(254) 710-1768
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Baylor BU English Faculty Publications Mark Twain Under Fire
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    • Publications
      Back
      • 102 Days of Lying About Lauren
      • Bastille Day
      • The Interpretation of Owls
      • James Joyce and Samaritan Hospitality
      • Literacy in a Long Blues Note
      • Modernity, Community, and Place in Brian Friel's Drama
      • Modernist Authorship and Transatlantic Periodical Culture
      • A Fire to Light Our Tongues
      • Hollow Palaces
      • Haunted Property
      • American Literary Cultures
      • Sacred Rhetorical Education in 19th Century America
      • Modernism in the Green
      • A Long, Long Way
      • Hope and Aesthetic Utility in Modernist Literature
      • The Courage to See
      • The Evil Twins of American Television
      • Harvest Bells
      • Letters of a Long Name
      • Constructing Nineteenth-Century Religion
      • Reforming Women
      • Thomas Hoccleve
      • Mark Twain Under Fire
      • Building Natures
      • Understanding Marilynne Robinson
      • Living with the Living Dead
      • The Life Group
      • Then Winter
      • Building Jerusalem
      • The Divine Face in Four Writers
      • Seamus Heaney: An Introduction
      • Imagined Spiritual Communities in Britain's Age of Print
      • Housework and Gender in American Television
      • The Boke of the Cyte of Ladyes
      • Entertaining Judgment
      • Seamus Heaney's Regions
      • Elegy on Kinderklavier
      • Tracing Southern Storytelling in Black and White
      • Mapping Christian Rhetorics
      • The Tulip-Flame
      • The Glyph and the Gramophone
      • The Prodigal
      • Beyond the Pulpit
      • The Reconstruction of Mark Twain
      • Sylvia Plath's Fiction
  • Organizations
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    • 20CRS
    • House of Poetry
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