Lighting Out For the Territory: Reflections on Mark Twain and American Culture [Hardcover]

Shelley Fisher Fishkin (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 12, 1996

Mark Twain has been called the American Cervantes, our Homer, our Tolstoy, our Shakespeare. Ernest Hemingway maintained that "all modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn." President Franklin Delano Roosevelt took the phrase "New Deal" from A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. Twain's Gilded Age gave an entire era its name. Twain is everywhere--in ads for Bass Ale, in episodes of "Star Trek," as a greeter in Nevada's Silver Legacy casino. Clearly, the reports of his death have been greatly exaggerated. In Lighting Out for the Territory, Twain scholar Shelley Fisher Fishkin blends personal narrative with reflections on history, literature, and popular culture to provide a lively and provocative look at who Mark Twain really was, how he got to be that way, and what we do with his legacy today.
Fishkin illuminates the many ways that America has embraced Mark Twain--from the scenes and plots of his novels, to his famous quips, to his bushy-haired, white-suited persona. She reveals that we have constructed a Twain often far removed from the actual writer. For instance, we travel to Hannibal, Missouri, Mark Twain's home town, a locale that in his work is both the embodiment of the innocence of childhood and also an emblem of hypocrisy, barbarity, and moral rot. The author spotlights the fact that Hannibal today attracts hundreds of thousands of tourists and takes in millions yearly, by focusing on Tom Sawyer's boyhood exploits--marble-shoots and white-washed fences--and ignoring Twain's portraits of the darker side of the slave South. The narrative moves back and forth from modern Hannibal to antebellum Hannibal and to Mark Twain's childhood experiences with brutality and slavery. Her exploration of those subjects in his work shows that Tom Sawyer's fence isn't the only thing being white-washed in Hannibal. Fishkin's research yields fresh insights into the remarkable story of how this child of slaveholders became the author of the most powerful anti-racist novel by an American.
Whether lending his name to a pizza parlor in Louisiana, a diner in Jackson Heights, New York, or an asteroid in outer space, whether making cameo appearances on "Cheers" and "Bonanza," or turning up in novels as a detective or a love interest, Mark Twain's presence in contemporary culture is pervasive and intriguing. Fishkin's wide-ranging examination of that presence demonstrates how Twain and his work echo, ripple, and reverberate throughout our society. We learn that Walt Disney was a great fan of Twain's fiction (in fact, "Tom Sawyer's Island" in Disneyland is the only part of the park that Disney himself designed) as is Chuck Jones, who credits the genesis of cartoon character Wile E. Coyote to the comic description of a coyote in Roughing It. We learn of Mark Twain impersonators (Hal Holbrook, for instance, has played Twain in some 1,500 performances) and recent movie versions of Twain books, such as A Million to Juan. And we discover how Twain's image can be seen in claymation, in animatronics and robotics, in virtual reality, and on any number of home-pages on the Internet.
Lighting Out for the Territory offers an engrossing look at how Mark Twain's life and work have been cherished, memorialized, exploited, and misunderstood. It offers a wealth of insight into Twain, into his work, and into our nation, both past and present.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Mark Twain once jotted in his notebook, "No, I am not an American, I am the American." He may have been joking or perhaps just thinking on the page, but he was close to the truth: he is everywhere in American society.

Shelley Fisher Fishkin, editor of the 29-volume Oxford Mark Twain, has written an engaging travel book based on her rambles, both literal and intellectual, through the vast realm of Twain. From children in Hannibal, Missouri, performing a Tom Sawyer pageant to horribly mistaken intellectuals railing against Huckleberry Finn, Fishkin has ranged far and wide, searching for what Twain means today.

Lighting Out for the Territory tackles such serious intellectual issues as the perpetual accusation that Twain was a racist. It also provides entertaining digressions into Twain's appearances in pop culture, ranging from beer ads to an appearance on Star Trek.

From Publishers Weekly

Certain literary scholars reach a point in their careers when they earn enough distinction in their field to write something other than literary criticism. Fishkin, lifelong Twain scholar, is just such a scholar. In her previous volume, Was Huck Black?, Fishkin boldly argued for the influence of African American voices on Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Here, she has produced a collection of essays that is one part American history, one part literary criticism and two parts travelogue. Drawing on America's geography and popular culture for background, Fishkin revisits her earlier work from the perspective of a stranger in a strange land-the "world of Twain" as it exists in America today. In her first essay, Fishkin describes with biting irony her visit to Hannibal, Mo., Twain's birthplace, which is now a tourist trap, and the obliviousness of Hannibal's citizens to Twain's darker views on Southern racism. In her second, she visits the abolitionist town of Elmira, N.Y. in an attempt to understand why Twain's residence there changed his views on race. In the third, she takes up Twain's popular presence in film, modern novels and on stage. Fishkin is fascinating and cogent throughout: tough on censorship, soft on Twain, Fishkin's book is a call to arms that we not forget America's history of racism by banning from our classrooms one of the few authors who wrote about it with honesty and clarity.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 272 pages
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA (December 12, 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0195105311
• ISBN-13: 978-0195105315
• Product Dimensions: 9.6 x 6.6 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,436,516 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Shelley Fisher Fishkin's broad, interdisciplinary research interests have led her to focus on topics including the ways in which American writers' apprenticeships in journalism shaped their poetry and fiction; the influence of African American voices on canonical American literature; the need to desegregate American literary studies; American theatre history; the development of feminist criticism; the relationship between public history and literary history; literature and animal welfare; and the challenge of doing transnational American Studies. Although much of her work has centered on Mark Twain, she has also published on writers including Gloria Anzaldua, John Dos Passos, Frederick Douglass, Theodore Dreiser, W.E.B. Du Bois, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Erica Jong, Maxine Hong Kingston, Tillie Olsen, and Walt Whitman.

Dr. Fishkin is a Professor of English and Director of the Program in American Studies at Stanford University. After receiving her B.A.from Yale College (summa cum laude, phi beta kappa), she stayed on at Yale for a masters degree in English and a Ph.D. in American Studies, and was Director of the Poynter Fellowship in Journalism there. She taught American Studies and English at the University of Texas from 1985 to 2003, and was Chair of the Department of American Studies. She is a Life Member of Clare Hall, Cambridge University, England, where she was a Visiting Fellow, and has twice been a Visiting Scholar at Stanford's Institute for Research on Women and Gender. She has been awarded an American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship, was a Fulbright Distinguished Lecturer in Japan, and was the winner of a Harry H. Ransom Teaching Excellence Award at the University of Texas.

Dr. Fishkin is the author, editor or co-editor of over forty books and has published over eighty articles, essays and reviews. Her work has been translated into Spanish, Japanese, Chinese, Russian, Georgian, and Italian, and has been published in English-language journals in Turkey, Japan, and Korea. She is the author of: From Fact to Fiction: Journalism and Imaginative Writing in America (winner of a Frank Luther Mott/Kappa Tau Alpha Award for outstanding research in journalism history) (Johns Hopkins, 1985); Was Huck Black? Mark Twain and African-American Voices (selected as an "Outstanding Academic Book" by Choice) (Oxford, 1993); Lighting Out for the Territory: Reflections on Mark Twain and American Culture (Oxford, 1997), and Feminist Engagements: Forays Into American Literature and Culture (selected as an "Outstanding Academic Title" by Choice) (Palgrave/Macmillan, 2009). She is the editor of the 29-volume Oxford Mark Twain (Oxford, 1996; Paperback reprint edition, 2009), the Oxford Historical Guide to Mark Twain (Oxford, 2002), "Is He Dead?" A New Comedy by Mark Twain (University of California, 2003), Mark Twain's Book of Animals (Univerisity of California Press, 2009), and The Mark Twain Anthology: Great Writers on his LIfe and Work (Library of America, 2010). She is also a producer of the adaptation of Twain's "Is He Dead?" which had its world debut on Broadway at the Lyceum Theatre in 2007, and was nominated for a Tony Award. She is the co-editor of Listening to Silences: New Essays in Feminist Criticism (Oxford, 1994); People of the Book: Thirty Scholars Reflect on Their Jewish Identity (Wisconsin, 1996); The Encyclopedia of Civil Rights in America (M.E. Sharpe, 1997); Mark Twain at the Turn of the Century, 1890-1910 (Arizona Quarterly, 2005); 'Sport of the Gods' and Other Essential Writing by Paul Laurence Dunbar (Random House, 2005), Anthology of American Literature, ninth edition (Prentice-Hall, 2006), Concise Anthology of American Literature, seventh edition (Prentice-Hall, 2010), and a special issue of African American Review devoted to the work of Paul Laurence Dunbar (autumn 2007). From 1993 to 2003 she co-edited Oxford University Press's "Race and American Culture" book series with Arnold Rampersad. She was co-founder of the Charlotte Perkins Gilman society, and has been president of the Mark Twain Circle of America and chair of the MLA Nonfiction Prose Division. She recently finished a term as President of the American Studies Association, and gave keynote talks during the last five years at national American Studies conferences in China, Denmark, Ireland, Japan, Korea, Russia, Taiwan, the United Kingdom, and the U.S. Her research has been featured twice on the front page of the New York Times, and in 2009 she was awarded the Mark Twain Circle's Certificate of Merit "for long and distinguished service in the elucidation of the work, thought, life and art of Mark Twain." She is t a member of the Board of Governors of the Humanities Research Institute of the University of California, and is a founding Editor of the new online Journal of Transnational American Studies [see http://news.stanford.edu/news/2009/march11/fishkin-publishes-american-studies-journal-030409.html and http://humanexperience.stanford.edu/twainanimals].

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Excellent, But Covers Too much Ground, June 12, 2000

By 

M. Allen Greenbaum (California) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Lighting Out for the Territory: Reflections on Mark Twain and American Culture (Paperback)

This book is all over the map. At its best the book covers the intellectual and moral distance from Twain's boyhood in Hannibal (where slavery was accepted as "natural") to his Elmira, Connecticut evolution, where, as a kind of Southern expatriate (and son-in-law of a fervent abolitionist living in an important Underground railway stop), he challenged himself and the nation to fight racial inequality. At its worst, the book is a somewhat self-important narrative of the author's journey from researcher to advocate. In toto, it is well worth reading.

Dr. Fishkin, editor of Oxford's complete works of Mark Twain, wrote the earlier "Was Huck Black? Mark Twain and African-American voices" in which she argues that the "voice" of Huck Finn is drawn directly from the "rich creative oral tradition" of slaves and ex-slaves whom Twain met. Here she revisits Hannibal, the town that practiced "mild domestic slavery," though Twain's own father sold a slave "down the river" (and away from his family) for $40 worth of tar. Perhaps not coincidentally this is how much the eventually tar-feathered king and duke received for selling Jim. Racism is still evident in Hannibal, where the "erasure" of any black history mirrors the nationwide removal of "Huckleberry Finn" from school libraries. Fishkin argues convincingly that Twain's use of humor and irony serves, from Elmira onward, to expose, ridicule, and directly confront the enduring injustices of the Reconstruction years. Indeed, the controversial ending of `Finn,' in which an already-freed Jim is locked up and subjected to terrors by Tom and Huck, is interpreted by Fishkin and others as an accurate comment on the mirage of freedom offered to ex-slaves during Reconstruction.

This covers the first 126 pages of the book, and aside from some rather self-important comment on a five-year-old's hitting her with a miniature bullwhip, "I had just been bullwhipped on the banks of the Mississippi," it is a sobering and fascinating account of the racial whitewashing of Hannibal and America.

The next 77 pages contain some redundant, wide-eyed commentary on the omnipresence of Twain in American culture, both low and high (Chapter 3), and, in the epilogue, unnecessary innocent-by-association defenses of Twain. Both sections could have been pruned and achieved the same effect. Chapter 3 is amusing; it seems that Twain's image has been appropriated by entrepreneurs, playwrights and others to sell everything from imported ale to dry-cleaning to TV scripts. Many of Twain's famous quotes (e.g., "Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it," and "The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco") are either undocumented or came from someone else. But these examples, while suggesting that Twain functions the "consummate Rorschach test" of one's beliefs about America, are piled atop each other to include digressions such as which is the best movie adaptation of Twain's work; a long catalogue of books and other media that are either about Twain, "borrow" from his works (including her 11-year-old's "A Return to Camelot"), or that feature a fictionalized Twain; a comparison of both Fishkin's laptop computer and an IBM voice recognition machine to Twain's interest in an automatic typesetting machine. (The IBM machine, Fishkin dutifully reports, interpreted Twain's "rotten glad" as "writing glad," and "anybody but lied" as "any body butterfly.")

The "epilogue" also takes too long; Dr. Fishkin vigorously but somewhat condescendingly defends "Huckleberry Finn" from Jane Smiley's 1992 critique in "Harper's." Fishkin questions whether Smiley's could comprehend writer Ralph Wiley's deep valuation of Twain: "How could understanding Mark Twain's works be essential to any child in twenty-first century America....Smiley would shake her head. Not a clue." Dr. Fishkin also parades an all-star gallery of authors who defend Twain, and comment on his influence on their writing. She quotes a "silver-haired Oxford don" who sputtered, "This is going to sound very negative, but I can't figure out what you Americans see in this book," and later speculates, somewhat smugly, that the "don would have agreed, most likely" with an 1870 British publication describing Twain as a "very offensive specimen of the vulgarest kind of Yankee."

This is still an excellent book, despite its need for some editorial restraint, and its meandering trip through Twain's influence on culture. Because the book has so much to offer its few faults are all the more annoying. Perhaps Dr. Fishkin is preaching to the unconverted: Those who think Twain's masterpiece is a racist tract that should be abolished from schools and libraries. Despite the few flaws towards the end of the book, it is a fascinating account of a man's--and a nation's--challenging journey towards its ideals.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars First-rate meditation on Twain and scholarship., April 22, 2002

By 

R. B. Bernstein "R. B. Bernstein, Adjunct Pro... (Brooklyn, New York USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Lighting Out for the Territory: Reflections on Mark Twain and American Culture (Paperback)

Shelley Fisher Fishkin clearly loves her work. She loves Mark Twain and she loves being able to write about him and teach about him. This book, written in an invitingly direct and personal style free of jargon, is best read as a voyage into the life and thought of a fine and creative scholar fully engaged with her chosen subject.

The book is arranged into three chapters. The first, "The Matter of Hannibal," ably juxtaposes Fishkin's experience of a visit to Hannibal, MO, and her reflections on that visit with her investigation of the role of Hannibal, MO, and Twain's youthful experiences on his classic novels THE ADVENTURES OF TOM SAWYER and THE ADVENTURES OF HUCKLEBERRY FINN. The second, EXCAVATIONS, is a quasi-autobiographical account of her research and writing of her most famous book (WAS HUCK BLACK? MARK TWAIN AND AFRICAN-AMERICAN VOICES), blended with her reflections on the controversy surrounding HUCKLEBERRY FINN as an allegedly racist book. The last chapter, RIPPLES AND REVERBERATIONS, is a blend of historical literary criticism and meditations on the uses to which Americans and others have put Mark Twain the writer, "Mark Twain" the self-created character, and Mark Twain the human being.

LIGHTING OUT FOR THE TERRITORY is a lovely book; it's a dream to read, and it's thought-provoking in the best sense. It's a model of how literary critics should write both for one another and for a wider audience, and it's an eye-opening examination of one of the greatest writers this country -- or the human race -- ever produced.

-- R.B. Bernstein, Adjunct Professor of Law, New York Law School

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars intelligent and well written, April 11, 2009

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Judith Caesar (Sharjah, UAE) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Lighting Out for the Territory: Reflections on Mark Twain and American Culture (Paperback)

I find the book very refreshing on a number of counts. First, it demonstrates the ways in which the actual history of Blacks and Whites in American has often been misrepresented not only by fake historical re-creations such as the ones the author encountered in Hanibal, but by school texts, historical markers, and museum exhibits as well. Balanced and fair-minded, she also points out the struggles of people like the mayor of Hanibal to correct those distortions. Second, she helps to put to rest the often repeated charge that Huckleberry Finn is a racist novel by putting it in the context of Twain's other writings. Because the book is not only informative, but interesting and easy to read,I will recommend this book to my students. I am very glad our library has it. Every college library should.