By Richard S. Lowry
As Mark Twain, Samuel Clemens straddled the conflicts among tradition and trade that characterised the period he named the Gilded Age. In "Littery Man", Richard Lowry examines how Twain used those conflicts in his significant texts to model an "autobiography of authorship," a story of his personal claims to literary authority at that second whilst the yankee author emerged as a occupation. Drawing on wide variety of cultural genres--popular boys' fiction, childbearing manuals, trip narratives, autobiography, and feedback and fiction of the period--Lowry reconstructs how Twain participated in remaking the "literary" right into a robust social type of illustration. He indicates how, as considered one of our cultures first smooth celebrities, Samuel Clemens reworked his existence into the crafty functionality we now have come to grasp as Mark Twain, and his texts right into a looking out critique of recent id in a mass-mediated society. "Littery guy" will entice either Twain students and to students and scholars of nineteenth-century American literature and tradition.
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Additional resources for ''Littery Man'': Mark Twain and Modern Authorship (Commonwealth Center Studies in American Culture)
Sample text
He refused Houghton's offer to serialize Tom Sawyer before book publication because it would leave him vulnerable to newspaper reprinting, and hence dilute his market. There just was not enough money in the proposition. "89 He also turned down Houghton's American Fiction project on the same grounds. ")90 Instead, he published with Elisha Bliss's American Publishing Company in Hartford, which marketed its books directly by "subscription" or installment, with armies of agents traveling door-to-door.
72 The rhetoric of reverence thus served to consolidate aesthetic taste, cultural value, and social identity into a figured author who "embodied" the literary for a reading market. 73 In one sense, Houghton's efforts were not especially innovative, marking as they did but one more stage in the late nineteenth century's merging of poetics and economics. N. "76 By the 1870s, not only was a name essential for economic success, a work had virtually no literary value unless it was known by its author.
Twain's contradictory versions of the reception of his performance do more than merely reflect his ambivalence about his speech; they perpetuate the subtle tension of identity and antagonism with his audience that generated his tale in the first place. They refigure the ambiguities that Twain inscribes in his talk when he casts himself both as the innocent bearer of someone else's puzzling tale—after all, he merely tells his audience what the miner told him—and, of course, the author of the tale he tells.