... for scholars and critics. Also notable are a huge study of Twain’s humor, a provocative book about Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and two books about Mark Twain and China. Book chapters and articles span Twain’s career, with examinations of some works that are often overlooked. This year shows...

.... There are fewer book-length studies, but several are of high quality, especially a book on Twain’s brand of humor. One article is advertised as a “block- buster,” although that remains to be seen. The Mark Twain Annual turns ten and offers tributes to the late Michael J. Kiskis, James M. Cox, and Thomas...

... Yankee, and Tom Sawyer Abroad. 76 Mark Twain Mark Twain, Satire, and the Assault of Laughter, a special issue of Studies in American Humor (n.s. 4, ii), considers a number of topics, with special emphasis on Twain s comment in The Mysterious Stranger, Against the assault of laughter, nothing can...

... Milder—which he classifies more specifically as a “literary life” story—alongside essays about Henry James as one of the early biographers of Hawthorne. Addi- tionally, a special issue of the Nathaniel Hawthorne Review revels in the intersections between the author’s humor and his storytelling...

... improved the Encyclopedia of 20th-Century American Humor (Greenwood), whose edi- tors, Alleen Pace Nilsen and Don L. F. Nilsen, are newsletter editor and executive secretary, respectively, of the International Society of Humor Studies. The almost 100 entries cover a quirky and unpredictable mix...

... Street, likening a drive down its surface to an arduous journey by ship there ought to be a chart of the street made, with the soundings marked on it ii Biography Lawrence I. Berkove fills in a few more gaps in the record of Twain s Western years in The Comstock Matrix of Twain s Humor pp. 160 70...

... with gems of humor, insight, and at times American Literary Scholarship (2013) doi 10.1215/00659142-2846649 © 2015 by Duke University Press 82 Mark Twain vitriol. The biographical dictations cover the period from 2 April 1906 to 28 February 1907...

... 99 humorous sketches, short stories, memoirs, essays, letters, and poems in The Sagebrush Anthology: Literature from the Silver Age of the Old West (Missouri). A few of the names, like Dan DeQuille and Joe T. Good- man, are still recognizable, but the surprise of this rollicking volume...

... to elicit the most attention. Essays on Native American writers, new biogra- phies on Longfellow and Henry Timrod, and an illuminating book on antebellum Southern humor are also noteworthy contributions. i  Period Studies Mary Loeffelholz’sFrom School to Salon reclaims and thereby...

... in the usually infallible Mark Twain A–Z (see AmLS 1995, p. 94). Then in a substantive afterword Blount humorously likens the potential Atlantic contributors (Lowell, Holmes, Aldrich, Howells, Harte, T rowbridge, Warner, James) to Twain’s fantasy of an adult version of Tom Sawyer’s gang, sketches out...

... of its three fields, elegantly written, lucidly organized, and not without wryly effective humor, it is a book I plan to reread at leisure. Bringing together two of his lifelong scholarly interests, Noel Polk collects seven of his essays on Faulkner and four on Eudora Welty in Faulkner and Welty...

... Humor of the Old South, an impressive collection of 17 essays (9 written expressly for this volume) introduced by James H. Justus. The reprinted essays, 2 of which reach back to the mid- 1970s, display the critical insight of such respected scholars as Leo Lemay, Richard Gray, William E. Lenz...

... in such elegant style. In the course of editing Mark Twain’s letters Smith and Frank un- earthed a humorous talk that Mark Twain gave on 12 May 1875 at the Asylum Hill Congregational Church in Hartford, transcribed a day later Alan Gribben 87 in an article...

... the stereo- type Sta ord identifies Jupiter as the long-tail d blue the African American counterpart to Yankee Jonathan. Sta ord s essay also shows how Poe used humor to undermine the narrator s perspective and miti- gate the story s potentially horrific elements. David Tomlinson s flippant...

... Directions in American Humor / David E. E. Sloane, New Directions in American Humor (Alabama) New Readings of the American Novel / Peter Messent, New Readings of the American Novel: Narrative Theory and Its Application (Alabama) Other Sisterhoods / Sandra Kumamoto Stanley, ed., Other Sisterhoods: Lit- erary...

.... Ross’s ‘‘ Jason Compson and Sut Lovingood: Southwestern Humor as Stream of Consciousness,’ ’ pp. 236–346 in Humor of the Old South, which reads Jason’s monologue alongside Sut Lovingood’s Yarns to explicate ‘‘a convergence of tone’’ and to claim Sut as Jason’s ‘‘closest ancestor...

... by a year’s periodical dancing before the public’’ and would terminate this journalistic phase of his artistic maturation. Yet as McCullough and McIntire-Strasburg point out, the items he contributed to the Express ‘‘compare favorably with Twain’s best humor’’ and rehearse some of the techniques...

... Twain: The Fate of Humor (see AmLS 1966, pp. 54–56). Robinson has either achieved this feat or come very close. Twain’s guiltily ambivalent feelings about the Civil War are attracting increasing attention. In “Mark Twain’s Lincoln as ‘Man of the Border’: Religion, Free Thinking...

... 1973, p. 104)—but its contents had remained unpublished. Fishkin de- fends Is He Dead? as ‘‘an engaging and (for Twain) unusually well-plotted comedy energized by the sly wit and insouciant humor Twain was able to muster A related article by Jennifer K. Ruark praises Fishkin as ‘‘proba- bly...

... by Hemingway and Steinbeck” HN( 26, i: 81–95), studies the bilingual elements in fiction by these two writers, whose wordplay and humor help to bridge gaps between the English and Spanish cultures and to provide “a privileged perspective on the text[s]” for bilingual students. In “On the Wire...