About this product

Product Identifiers

PublisherUniversity of Alabama Press

ISBN-100817319158

ISBN-139780817319151

eBay Product ID (ePID)219207935

Product Key Features

Number of Pages128 Pages

LanguageEnglish

Publication NameMark Twain at Home : How Family Shaped Twain's Fiction

SubjectAmerican / General, Subjects & Themes / General

Publication Year2016

TypeTextbook

AuthorMichael J. Kiskis

Subject AreaLiterary Criticism

SeriesStudies in American Literary Realism and Naturalism Ser.

FormatHardcover

Dimensions

Item Height0.8 in

Item Weight12 Oz

Item Length9.1 in

Item Width6.2 in

Additional Product Features

Edition Number3

Intended AudienceScholarly & Professional

LCCN2015-041931

Dewey Edition23

Reviews"At a cultural moment when the humanities, and literary study more specifically, are striving to convince the world at large of their relevance, Michael Kiskis gives us a model of how to do so. It's a remarkable piece of writing." --Ann Ryan, coeditor of Cosmopolitan Twain "Kiskis' focus on the centrality of domesticity and human connection is important to Mark Twain criticism, and, in many ways, a correction to the ways Mark Twain's work and his life have been read and analyzed." --John Bird, author of Mark Twain and Metaphor, " Twain's characters are often interpreted an individualists fleeing civilizing forces. Even in biographical criticism, Twain's increasing reliance on his family is seen as a threat to his iconoclastic voice. Pushing back against these dominant readings, Kiskis argues that domesticity and community are of primary importance in Twain's later works, especially in his novels between 1876 and 1894." -- American Literature

Afterword byScharnhorst, Gary

Dewey Decimal813/.409

SynopsisExplores the influence of domesticity on the writing and career of Samuel Clemens, reframing with rich biographical detail and historical context Twain's major late-nineteenth century work, Twain scholar Michael J. Kiskis opens this fascinating new exploration of Twain with the observation that most readers have no idea that Samuel Clemens was the father of four and that he lived through the deaths of three of his children as well as his wife. In Mark Twain at Home: How Family Shaped Twain's Fiction , Kiskis persuasively argues that not only was Mark Twain not, as many believe, "antidomestic," but rather that home and family were the muse and core message of his writing. Mark Twain was the child of a loveless marriage and a homelife over which hovered the constant specter of violence. Informed by his difficult childhood, orthodox readings of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn frame these canonical literary figures as nostalgic--autobiographical fables of heroic individualists slipping the bonds of domestic life. Kiskis, however, presents a wealth of biographical details about Samuel Clemens and his family that reinterpret Twain's work as a robust affirmation of domestic spheres of life. Among Kiskis's themes are that, as the nineteenth century witnessed high rates of orphanhood and childhood mortality, Clemens's work often depicted unmoored children seeking not escape from home but rather seeking the redemption and safety available only in familial structures. Similarly, Mark Twain at Home demonstrates that, following the birth of his first daughter, Twain began to exhibit in his writing an anxiety with social ills, notably those that affected children. In vigorous and accessible descriptions of Twain's life as it became reflected in his prose, Kiskis offers a compelling and fresh understanding of this work of this iconic American author.

LC Classification NumberPS1342.H55K57 2016