Volume 36, Number 12 · July 20, 1989
The Parting of the Twains
By Frederick C. Crews
Dark Twins: Imposture and Identity in Mark Twain's America
by Susan Gillman
University of Chicago Press, 217 pp., $12.95 (paper)
Mark Twain and Science: Adventures of a Mind
by Sherwood Cummings
Louisiana State University Press, 224 pp., $27.50
One need get no further into Susan Gillman's Dark Twins than the back cover to become aware that this will be a landmark book—one establishing a previously untested, if also an inevitable, vantage on America's best-known writer. In Gillman's study, says the publisher's description, Mark Twain 'stands forth finally as a representative man, not only a child of his culture, but also as one implicated in a continuing American anxiety about freedom, race, and identity.' And then follows a seal of methodological approval from Frank Lentricchia of Duke, now arguably the most influential of academic critic-theorists. Gillman's 'superb book,' Lentricchia says, 'comes out on the side of those who find too much recent theory as [sic] needlessly abstract, formalistic, ahistorical; on the side of those, that is, who call for a materially dense, historically engaged practice.'
Review, 7876 words
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