Captain Stormfield, the main character in Mark Twain's last book, Extract from Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven (1909), appears numerous times--under either the Stormfield name or some other--in Twain's published and unpublished works. Scholar's since Train's death have given only passing or slight notice to the Stormfield character. His numerous appearances, however his pivotal function among several unfinished works, and his essential optimism must lead to an awareness of his significant role in Twain's fiction.

In this paper, I argue that legal authorities assign speaking power to objects and evidence in the courtroom in order to deny speaking power to racialized subjects and police racial identities. Mark Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson (1894) demonstrates how the law transverses the human/object boundary in order to regulate legal definitions of identity. I examine the legal animation of the textual document, as exemplified by the last will and testament; the knife, a material object that as a murder weapon is responsible for condemning the accused; and the fingerprint, a unique form of bodily evidence that merges the textual and the material, in order to understand how these objects blur the line between the living and the deceased, between human and nonhuman agency, and between body and text. My methodology brings object studies into conversation with a literature and the law approach in order to show not only how the nineteenth-century American literary imagination was concerned with testing and regulating racial boundaries, but also how fictions employed by the law produce subjects and objects. My investigation reminds us that when evidence appears to “speak for itself,” this speech act has been carefully orchestrated by human legal authorities who determine what the evidence can be understood to mean and for whom it speaks. / text

The purpose of this study is to explore Mark Twain's involvement with the southern ante-bellum experience as reflected in his Southern Trilogy, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Tom Sawyer's Comrade), and Pudd'nhead Wilson. He came to denounce the South more and more vehemently in these novels, and each occupies a critical position in his artistic and philosophical growth.

ABSTRACT The following thesis documents the costume design process and execution for the staged production of Mark Twain’s Is He Dead? as adapted by David Ives. It was produced at the University of New Orleans as part of the Film, Theatre, and Communication Arts Department 2011-2012 season in collaboration with New Orleans theatre company, The NOLA Project. In conjunction with the director and the design team, it is the role of the costume designer to support the overall concept of the production. The documentation of this process begins with the textual, historical, and visual research pertaining to the design concept. The various aspects of the costume design process are presented leading up to the execution of the final designs and successful realization of the play, concluding with a final analysis of the work. Supporting visual documentation and sources used to illustrate the phases of design are contained within the subsequent appendices. Costume Design, Mark Twain, Is He Dead?, Theater Design

This thesis examines how the sociopolitical contexts of the mid-twentieth century influenced readers’ interpretations of Mark Twain’s novel “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” and J.D. Salinger’s “The Catcher in the Rye,” two controversial novels that were subjected to censorship activity. In particular, this thesis will focus on the reception of both of these novels during the 1950s and 1960s, a period marked by two major events: The Civil Rights Movement and the youth counterculture phenomenon. In this study, the reception of “Huckleberry Finn” will be analyzed in the context of the civil rights movement, using news articles published in the 1950s and 1960s to illustrate how the different interpretations of readers prompted school board directors to ban the book from junior high and high school reading lists.

Diss.--Kiel--Univ., 1992. / Bibliogr. p. 365-381. Index.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2003. / Supervisor: Shelley Fisher Fishkin. Vita. Includes bibliographical references. Also available from UMI.

This project considers the objective and material manifestations of invention, as well as the subjective processes (creative and mechanical) that invention signifies, in order to examine the historical, aesthetic, and ideological roles that invention plays within American literature. I argue that invention calls attention to a paradox within American culture that literary texts are especially adept at revealing: the newness that invention fetishizes often contains a violent underside, which American literary authors both depict and complicate. In chapter 1 I establish the project's foundation--how invention became such a culturally prominent mode of action, and how inventions came to symbolize the march of American "progress." I treat the rhetoric of invention as a text which can be close-read for what it reveals about the role of American artifice in the nation's self-conception.In chapter two I argue that Herman Melville's Typee delivers a series of inventive counter-narratives that disarm the stereotypes that support colonization, and that deflate the sense of superiority that propelled Western colonialism. Using the rhetoric of invention against itself, including its portrayal of patents and intellectual property as necessary regulative mechanisms in the advancement of technology and industry, Typee undermines this logic by tapping into the subversive potential of invention as a creative force.Chapter two examines the various historical, aesthetic and disciplinary roles played by a specific American invention: the world's first automatic weapon. Arguing that its power to subdue crowds was due more to its cultural status than its actual use, I examine the paradox presented by a weapon like the Gatling gun and its depiction in Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee: that its elegant appearance and functionality, as well as the latency of the threat it posed, was a power that operated by taking advantage of aesthetic perception. The project's final chapter investigates the poetry and prose of Ezra Pound and Mina Loy for the enthusiasm it registers for, as Pound phrased it, "Machine Art." I argue that the formal invention that drove modernism cannot be divorced from the prominence of mechanical invention that American industry made prominent through the turn of the century.

Thesis (M.A.)--Eastern Illinois University, 1988. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 59-61).

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Missouri-Columbia, 2007. / The entire dissertation/thesis text is included in the research.pdf file; the official abstract appears in the short.pdf file (which also appears in the research.pdf); a non-technical general description, or public abstract, appears in the public.pdf file. Title from title screen of research.pdf file (viewed on November 9, 2007) Includes bibliographical references.