The Ghosts of Mark Twain (el. knyga) (skaityta knyga) | Ann M Ryan | knygos.lt

Aprašymas

In his autobiography, Mark Twain confesses that "from the cradle up I have been like the rest of the race--never quite sane in the night." Of all the memories and fears that disturbed Twain's peace of mind, none are more intractable than those associated with white fathers, Black men, the histories they reflect, and the future they promise.

The Ghosts of Mark Twain: A Study of Manhood, Memory, and Race investigates these tense intersections in Twain's life and work. Ann Ryan maps Twain's resistance to ideals of white masculinity and his frequent capitulation to them. While Twain reflects upon the history of white men--including the intimate memory of his father's failures and abuses--he also fears a future in which Black men will gain an authentic voice and agency. This volume calls into question a critical tradition that celebrates Twain's easy relation to Black culture, and it focuses specifically upon his anxiety that not all Black men are--as he describes the enslaved Daniel Quarles--friends and allies.

Some of the works considered in The Ghosts of Mark Twain are not widely known: "Which Was It?," "The United States of Lyncherdom," No. 44: The Mysterious Stranger, and the Morgan manuscript of Pudd'nhead Wilson. In the published texts--and the literary debris that surrounds them--Twain remembers his father, John Marshall Clemens, as a fraught embodiment of white manhood. In "Jim's Ghost Story," an excised section of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Twain wrestles with the disconcerting prospect of Black men who seek justice and retribution. Finally, in the fragments written toward the end of his life, Twain represents himself as a kind of ghost, a shadow figure displaced by an American culture that prefers adventure and romance to the frightening truths of a ghost story.