Mark Twain and Male Friendship

The Twichell, Howells, and Rogers Friendships
Erscheinungsjahr 2013
ISBN: 978-0-19-996410-9
Verlag: Oxford University Press

Buch, Englisch, 270 Seiten, Format (B × H): 156 mm x 234 mm, Gewicht: 415 g

Biographies of America's greatest humorist abound, but none have charted the overall influence of the key male friendships that profoundly informed his life and work. Combining biography, literary history, and gender studies, Mark Twain and Male Friendship presents a welcome new perspective as it examines three vastly different friendships and the stamp they left on Samuel Clemens's life.

With accessible prose informed by impressive research, the study provides an illuminating history of the friendships it explores, and the personal and cultural dynamic of the relationships. In the case of Twain and his pastor, Joseph Twichell, emphasis is put on the latter's role as mentor and spiritual advisor and on Twain's own waning sense of religious belonging. Messent then shifts gears to consider Twain's friendship with fellow author and collaborator William Dean Howells. Fascinating in
its own right, this relationship also serves as a prism through which to view the literary marketplace of nineteenth-century America. A third, seemingly unlikely friendship between Twain and Standard Oil executive H.H. Rogers focuses on Twain's attitude toward business and shows how Rogers and his
wife served as a surrogate family for the novelist after the death of his own wife.

As he charts these relationships, Messent uses existing work on male friendship, gender roles, and cultural change as a framework in which to situate altered conceptions of masculinity and of men's roles, not just in marriage but in the larger social networks of their time. In sum, Mark Twain and Male Friendship i s not only a valuable new resource on the great novelist but also a lively cultural history of male friendship in nineteenth-century America.

Zielgruppe

Scholars interested in Twain, nineteenth/early twentieth-century American literature and culture, and gender studies.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Messent, Peter

Fachgebiete

• Sozialwissenschaften Soziologie | Soziale Arbeit Soziale Gruppen/Soziale Themen Gender Studies, Geschlechtersoziologie
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literaturgeschichte und Literaturkritik
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literaturwissenschaft: Prosa, Erzählung, Roman, Prosaautoren

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Acknowledgments
Introduction
Chapter 1. Male Friendship and Post Civil War America
Chapter 2. Clemens and Twichell
Chapter 3. Clemens, Twichell and Religion
Chapter 4. 'My Dear 'Owells': Clemens and Howells
Chapter 5. Clemens, Howells, and Realism
Chapter 6. Clemens, Manhood, the Rogers Friendship, and 'Which Was the Dream?'
Chapter 7. Clemens and Rogers: 'Both Members of This Club'
Coda: Friendship's Limits: Fathers and Daughters Notes
Index

Über Autor(innen)

Peter Messent is Professor of Modern American Literature at the University of Nottingham. He is the author of several books, including The Cambridge Introduction to Mark Twain and New Readings of the American Novel.