Introduction

As submissions for this special issue flashed on my screen I stepped back to see what image of Mark Twain developed as scholars gave full throat to their own agenda and interests. We have here five essays that reflect not only careful literary scholarship but also demonstrate the diversity of topics abroad in Mark Twain studies: from Twain's literary hoax and his fascination with the San Francisco Minstrels to his careful exploration of female laughter; from his embrace of imagination and Socratic inquiry to his response to a philosophy that prompts moral and ethical imperatives. Each essay adds to our understanding of Mark Twain and the myriad and constantly shifting attitudes, topics, ideas, and processes that shaped his curiosity and his creativity.

We begin with voice. In "The Voice of Her Laughter: Mark Twain's Tragic Feminism" Ann Ryan announces: "To excite the laugher of women is, for Mark Twain, both a dangerous and seductive desire. . . . Mark Twain—the icon of American masculinity—imagines shattering patriarchal structures in a blast of feminine laughter. The evolution of Twain's feminism, as well as its final defeat, will be intimately associated with the sound of women laughing." For Ryan, humor is liberating, or at least is a strong challenge to convention. Laughter, of course, was also one of the intentions behind Mark Twain's hoax, though his humor was often a good deal more destructive than instructive. In "The Fluid Identity of 'Petrified Man'" Kerry Driscoll argues for an unconscious and, ultimately, an historically grounded lesson: "When repositioned within [a] contemporary pattern of 'persistent localized violence,' Twain's story of a mysterious stone man 'glued to the bedrock upon which he sat, as with a cement of adamant,' discovered by a group of silver miners who seek to blast him from his rightful place using the latest western technology, assumes an uncannily iconographic quality. His joke—no longer idle—in fact serves to dramatize and advance the cultural script of manifest destiny." So laughter is a mask for exploitation and usurpation.

Another kind of cultural acquisition appears in Mark Twain's lifelong attraction to minstrelsy. In "'The Trouble Begins at Eight': Mark Twain, the San Francisco Minstrels, and the Unsettling Legacy of Blackface Minstrelsy" Sharon McCoy introduces Mark Twain's appreciation of a particular brand of minstrel show. She writes,

Twain was delighted to find the successful San Francisco Minstrels in New York City when he arrived, and he attended their shows frequently. The fact that forty years later he still viewed these men as definitive of what he considered to be the 'real negro show' makes their performance style and success worthy of sustained investigation. This essay seeks to lay the groundwork for an extended examination of the nature of the San Francisco Minstrels' performances, focusing on why Twain might have found them so compelling and how this admiration informs and affects Twain's own deployment of blackface imagery.

This suggests the depth of Twain's indebtedness to this particular group of performers, a debt not previously understood.

Indebtedness to previous traditions or thinkers comes into play in two essays. In "Transcendental Twain: A New Reading of 'What is Man?'" Jennifer Gurley works to separate Twain's "gospel" from its place among polemical essays. According to Gurley, "What is Man?" "insists not on truth claims per se, but instead on the power of intuition; and, at the same time, it bears witness to culture's power to undo intuition. . . . If we would trust ourselves, [Twain] thought, intuition could be allowed to guide us to thinking, that is, to examining ourselves within and our claims upon the world. If we trust others, the faculty will only seem 'petrify'ing, and we never will get to thinking. Intuition paradoxically can enable us to become our own influence. . . . Twain is more Emersonian than we thought." Intuition may also lead to moral and ethical designs; and Twain's affinity for philosophy introduces his reliance on yet another thinker. That is the point behind Jeffrey W. Miller's "Kantian Ethics in A Connecticut Yankee." As Miller argues, Hank Morgan is "above all a political animal who coherently expresses...