Gender Play in Mark Twain: Cross-dressing and Transgression (Mark Twain and His Circle Series) [Hardcover]

Linda Morris (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 3, 2007

Twain troubled gender in much of his otherwise traditional fiction, depicting children whose sexual identities are switched at birth, tomboys, same-sex married couples, and even a male French painter who impersonates his own sister and becomes engaged to another man. Morris examines and interprets Twain s exploration of characters who transgress gendered conventions while tracing the degree to which themes of gender disruption interact with other themes, such as his critique of race, his concern with death in his classic boys books, and his career-long preoccupation with twins and twinning. Morris shows that Twain depicts cross-dressing sometimes as comic or absurd, other times as darkly tragic but that even at his most playful, he contests traditional Victorian notions about the fixity of gender roles. Twain understands that gender, like race, is a social construction and above all a performance.

Editorial Reviews

Review

“A very clear, ground breaking study of transvestism in Mark Twain’s works. Linda Morris is tackling a subject that has become of increasing interest in recent years, and she is doing so more broadly than most scholars have attempted to, bringing together both short and long works produced over a broad span of Twain’s writing life.”—Susan K. Harris, author of The Courtship of Olivia Langdon and Mark Twain

About the Author

Linda A. Morris is Professor Emeritus of English at the University of California Davis and lives in Berkeley. She is author of Women s Humor in the Age of Gentility: The Life and Works of Frances Miriam Whitcher and, most recently, editor of American Women Humorists: Critical Essays.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 200 pages
• Publisher: University of Missouri Press; 1 edition (September 3, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0826217591
• ISBN-13: 978-0826217592
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.1 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,740,879 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5 stars Insightful, Well-written literary scholarship, May 30, 2010

By 

Lawrence Howe - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Gender Play in Mark Twain: Cross-dressing and Transgression (Mark Twain and His Circle Series) (Hardcover)

Linda Morris's _Gender Play in Mark Twain_ demonstrates the merits of applying a gender studies perspective to the interpretation of Twain's writing, a significant departure from the traditional approaches that have dominated the study of America's most well-known writer. She persuasively argues that Mark Twain's "approach to gender is much more playful and experimental than most critics allow" and that he "subverted Victorian notions of fixed gender roles and essentialist constructions."

In my review of this book for the Mark Twain Forum, I praised its a rich mix of theoretical angles and carefully considered historical context. Morris's study is a model of critical scholarship, distinguished for its "fine analytical intelligence" and "lucid prose." "In this highly engaging book, Morris reveals the ways in which theory can discover meaning rather than obscure it. This latest contribution to Twain studies shows the merits of its approach and demonstrates the ways in which Twain's writing continues to be relevant to new critical paradigms."


Larry Howe
Roosevelt University