Mark Twain's Autobiographies: Which Was the Truth?
Item
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Title
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Mark Twain's Autobiographies: Which Was the Truth?
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Identifier
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d_2009_2013:c50cbe2a89e7:11713
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identifier
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12317
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Creator
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Irby, John Archer,
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Contributor
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Fred Kaplan
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Date
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2013
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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American literature | Biographies | autobiography | Mark Twain | modernism
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Abstract
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Mark Twain's Autobiography is an unheralded early work of literary Modernism in a genre which until now has no recognized siblings and for this reason alone deserves recognition and examination. In addition, it is a major work by one of America's most praised and recognized authors which has not even at this date been published entirely even though it had been excerpted, truncated and reordered by four different editors even before the University of California at Berkeley commenced what is promised to be a complete and authorized edition. The different editions deserve examination in light of what the multiple editorial decisions imply about a modernistic autobiography in terms of its recognition as being modernistic. The very existence of the different editions also embodies implications regarding the nature of modernistic literature, such as editorial and public preferences and modernistic literature's form. The plural nature of the autobiographies in the title refers to the fragments and abortive starts, both fictional and non-fictional, produced by the author through a period of greater than three decades in his artistic struggle to determine a valid form and content for his autobiography as he conceived it must be.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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2009_2013.csv
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degree
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Ph.D.
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Program
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English
