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Littery Man: Mark Twain & Modern Authorship
Contributor(s): Lowry, Richard S. (Author)

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 ISBN: 0195102126     ISBN-13: 9780195102123
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
OUR PRICE: $86.45  

Binding Type: Hardcover - See All Available Formats & Editions
Published: June 1996
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Annotation: A self-styled "American vandal" who pursued literary celebrity with "a mercenary eye" even as genteel America proclaimed him the American Rabelais, Samuel Clemens, as Mark Twain, 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 a wide range of cultural genres - popular boys' fiction, childrearing 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 culture's 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.
Additional Information
BISAC Categories:
- Literary Criticism | American - General
Dewey: 818.409
LCCN: 95031814
Lexile Measure: 1570(Not Available)
Physical Information: 0.81" H x 6.52" W x 9.58" L (1.17 lbs) 192 pages
 
Descriptions, Reviews, Etc.
Publisher Description:
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.
 
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