Since I am currently interested in satire, I naturally gravitated towards requesting a book about Twain’s humor. This is a collection of essays by several different writers, so this promises to be more digressive rather than educational regarding how precisely Twain’s humor manages to affect readers and how it is structured. On the bright side many of these essays come from across the centuries of Twain criticism, so these might be some of the better examples of scholarly opinion on the subject.
“Originally published in 1993. The purpose of this volume is to lay out documents which give an estimate of Mark Twain as a humourist in both historical scope and in the analysis of modern scholars. The emphasis in this collection is on how Twain developed from a contemporary humourist among many others of his generation into a major comic writer and American spokesman and, in several more recent essays by younger Twain scholars, the outcomes of that development late in his career.”
The book is divided into critical remarks by periods of Twain’s life: early, middle and late. The topics addressed include: burlesque travel literature, regional studies, the novel genre, dramatic structure, methodless digressions, insightful lecturing, slang, farce, race, fame, anecdotes, banal theology, and autobiographic humor. Many of these are reviews of Twain in general, genres within his canon or individual works.
Since most of these are historic documents, this is an important artifact for Twain’s researchers as it would help a researcher find patterns, changes, or unique key words across these more insightful comments on an American classic.