With the rise of what has been lauded as the “transnational turn” in American studies, a new disciplinary emphasis on globalistic perspective, attention has turned to that most American of literary authors, from the golden age of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American imperialist adventure, who also happens to have been—in several senses of the phrasing—our greatest literary-cultural traveler. That figure is Mark Twain, by dint of personal experience the most traveled of our major authors, and with his major texts to this day still the most traveled in the American canon. (According to Selina Lai-Henderson, one of the writers reviewed here, Huckleberry Finn [1884] alone exists in ninety Chinese translations.) Accordingly, much recent attention has turned to Twain’s travel writings—themselves an imposing percentage of his titles—but also to analogous texts such as the Mississippi River writings, the historical romances, and the large number of works, many unfinished, centered on...

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