"Littery Man": Mark Twain and Modern Authorship

by Richard S. Lowry

Overview

As Mark Twain, Samuel Clemens straddled the conflicts between culture and commerce that characterized the era he named the Gilded Age. In "Littery Man", Richard Lowry examines how Twain used these conflicts in his major texts to fashion an "autobiography of authorship," a narrative of his own claims to literary authority at that moment when the American Writer emerged as a profession. Drawing on wide range of cultural genres--popular boys' fiction, childbearing manuals, travel narratives, autobiography, and criticism and fiction of the period--Lowry reconstructs how Twain participated in remaking the "literary" into a powerful social category of representation. He shows how, as one of our cultures first modern celebrities, Samuel Clemens transformed his life into the artful performance we have come to know as Mark Twain, and his texts into a searching critique of modern identity in a mass-mediated society. "Littery Man" will appeal to both Twain scholars and to scholars and students of nineteenth-century American literature and culture.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780195356243
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	06/27/1996
Series:	Commonwealth Center Studies in American Culture
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Lexile:	1570L (what's this?)
File size:	364 KB

About the Author

College of William and Mary

Editorial Reviews

"Lowry gives new, careful readings of Twain's work and raises many questions concerning Twain's use of humor and his narrative power, the authority of autobiography in his works, and the power of truth versus the authority of writing. Original ideas stud every page."—Choice

"Clearly, this book deserves a careful reading. The author's insights and his exhaustive command of the material merit the attention of all Twainians and indeed if any person devoted to nineteenth-century American literature."—Review

From the Publisher