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• W2761134794 abstract "154 Western American Literature The publisher’sclaim that Marotti “brings a fresh Continental perspective to bear” on Mark Twain scholarship is not always true. Her statements about the superiority of her critical method annoyed me, and her sacrifice of textual reading for critical theory was not to my taste. Finally, though, I must admit that although uneven, The Duplicating Imagination is a useful, sometimes brilliant investigation of the Mark Twain Papers. SUSAN J. REED Heidelberg College Mark Twain’s Puddn’head Wilson: Race, Conflict, and Culture. Edited by Susan Gillman and Forrest G. Robinson. (Durham: Duke University Press, 1990. 262 pages, $35.00/$16.95.) One gathers, from the number of times that Hershel Parker’s name comes up in these essays, that this collection was conceived, at least in part, as a response to Parker’s thumping of Pudd’nhead Wilson and its celebrators in his Flawed Texts and Verbal Icons (1984). At issue, one also gathers, is not so much what Parker says in that book as how he says it. The breezy, mocking tone he uses in exposing Twain’s careless compositional habits, and in admon­ ishing those critics who seek and find thematic “unity” in this “patently unreadable” novel, is in sharp contrast to the dead seriousness with which editors Susan Gillman and Forrest G. Robinson and their collaborators per­ form their critical inquiries. Yet in his essay, “The Sense ofDisorder in Pudd’nhead Wilson,” Robinson readily agrees with Parker that the novel’s “deeply fractured textual founda­ tion” is a fact that can no longer be ignored. Unlike Parker, however, who, at the moment he discovers what a mess the novel is, dismisses it as unworthy of serious study, Robinson contends that “there are meanings of great interest to be found in disunity, in thematic and structural discontinuities, radical dislocations between ‘parts,’sudden shifts in characterization, and endings that fail to ‘close’ completely.” A few of the twelve critics whose work is included in tliis volume follow Robinson’s lead in interpreting the flaws in Pudd’nhead Wilson as signposts of Twain’s highly anxious and self-censoring mind. Eric Sundquist, for one, reads the novel in terms of “the social and psychic turmoil that Twain, not least as a libera] Southerner living and working in the North, felt in the post-Reconstruction years.” Carolyn Porter sees Twain struggling throughout Pudd’nhead Wilson to repress the subversive force that Roxy, as “powerful black mother,” represents. Nevertheless, the prevailing tendency in these essays is to take Twain’s artistic control for granted and to treat the novel as a perfectly integrated whole. Needless to say, such an approach also takes for granted Twain’s wis­ dom, authority, and correct politics. Thus one finds, for example, John Carlos Reviews 155 Rowe’s interpretation of Pudd’nhead Wilson as a cogent and, by implication, coherent satire of an America infected by the disease of financial speculation. If I seem to slight the contributions of those critics who believe in Pudd’n­ head Wilson’s structural and thematic integrity, it is not because I think that Hershel Parker’s word is gospel. Certain critics had been troubled by the unevenness of the novel long before Parker’s textual scholarship confirmed their deepest doubts. The most compelling arguments in this volume, it seems to me, are those that take the problematic nature of Pudd’nhead Wilson into account, and work from there. PAUL HADELLA Arkansas State University Critical Essays on Robinson Jeffers. Edited by James Karman. (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1990. 278 pages, $45.00.) Introductions to anthologies of this sort, while customarily workmanlike and certainly helpful, are the sort of thing that academicians skim through. James Karman’s introduction to this useful volume is a splendid exception. Starting with Jeffers’s death and the reactions to it, he gives a tightly con­ structed account of the poet’s life, with special and welcome attention to the formative years. Karman’sdiscussion of “Continent’sEnd” isparticularly good and especially appropriate, for it addresses the essential role of the Pacific shore in Jeffers’s poetic life. The critical overview is excellent, and does not spare examples of the negative, even though Karman..." @default.
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• W2761134794 title "Mark Twain’s Puddn’head Wilson: Race, Conflict, and Culture ed. by Susan Gillman, Forrest G. Robinson" @default.
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