The author attempts to show in this thesis that Mark Twain was a serious observer and critic of life.

Many Twain scholars believe that his skepticism was based on personal tragedies of later years. Others find skepticism in Twain's work as early as The Innocents Abroad. This study determines that Twain's atheism is evident in his earliest writings. Chapter One examines what critics have determined Twain's religious sense to be. These contentions are discussed in light of recent publications and older, often ignored, evidence of Twain' s atheism. Chapter Two is a biographical look at Twain's literary, family, and community influences, and at events in Twain's life to show that his religious antipathy began when he was quite young. Chapter Three examines Twain's early sketches and journalistic squibs to prove that his voice, storytelling techniques, subject matter, and antipathy towards the church and other institutions are clearly manifested in his early writings.

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Over the last century, Americans have come to understand literature as a powerful tool for shaping individuals and society. Indeed, this perception of literature animates how Americans have and continue to debate what books to include—or exclude—in secondary school curricula. Texts dealing with issues of race, gender, and sexuality have proven especially controversial. This dissertation examines the claims people make about how reading literature can change readers and society through moral lessons. It offers case studies focused on three books that have been celebrated, banned, and taught in terms of their potential to inform readers’ moral and empathetic development: Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird (1960), Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), and Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987). This dissertation shows how assumptions about literature’s ability to inform a readers’ moral and empathetic development can be better understood in relation to the tradition of sentimental literature—a genre and rhetorical mode of storytelling aimed to promote moral and social reform by evoking certain feelings in readers. The case studies illustrate instances when the didactic rhetorical models of sentimental literature appear as a mode of reading and interpretation, which I refer to as sentimental hermeneutics. Building on studies of religion, literature, and secularism, this dissertation analyzes the religious dimensions that emerge in the ostensibly secular interpretive methods and ‘universal’ moral frameworks used to teach and interpret these texts. Contemporary sentimental hermeneutics are indebted to an historical synthesis between Christian devotional reading practices and sentimental fiction in the 19th century. The novels examined are at various levels of conformity and dissonance with the rhetorical modes and religious foundations of this sentimental tradition. My study shows how the unacknowledged religious lineage of interpretive and moral frameworks commonly used to teach these books enacts certain religious, social, and ontological exclusions. Each case study outlines limits of sentimental hermeneutics and the analysis of Beloved offers an alternative framework for readerly empathy. By restoring to view the often-hidden religious histories of these reading strategies, this project pushes readers to parochialize the universalizing claims of these ostensibly secular moral messages: it calls for a form of reading that moves past the exclusions of sentimental hermeneutics.

Cette thèse se donne pour enjeu de redéfinir l'identité littéraire de Mark Twain dans son articulation avec l'histoire. Clef de voûte de la mythologie nationale qui donne forme à l'identité américaine, le motif de la trace devient chez Twain un principe d'écriture où s'exprime une conscience historique dissidente. La réappropriation progressive de ce paradigme subvertit les représentations collectives pour définir une compréhension singulière de l'historicité de la nation et du devenir individuel. L'opposition entre la trace mnésique, inscription de l'histoire dans la profondeur du lieu, et la trace prospective, ébauche d'un tracé nouveau, structure dès l'origine les représentations symboliques de l'Ancien et du Nouveau Continent. À ces deux modalités de l'inscription correspondent chez Twain deux formes d'historicité, la stase et le progrès, et deux régimes politiques, la monarchie et la démocratie. Or son écriture subvertit cette polarité symbolique en dénonçant la stratification de l'histoire américaine, symptôme d'une dérive monarchique due à la perte des origines fondatrices de la nation. Se définit dès lors une économie historique où la trace des origines de la nation se révèle habitée par un régime de perte qui contamine quiconque cherche à les capter, tandis que le déterminisme des origines individuelles impose l'idée d'une fermeture de l'histoire. À l'emprise mortifère de la trace, l'écriture de Twain oppose l'utopie de la non-inscription, principe d'une sortie de l'histoire et d'une coïncidence retrouvée avec l'origine. La résurgence de tensions irrésolues dans les textes tardifs convertit cependant cette utopie en mise en scène de l'abolition de l'histoire. / : This thesis aims at redefining Mark Twain's literary identity in its articulation with history. The motif of the trace, which stands at the core of the national mythology that shapes American identity, is in Twain a writing principle expressing a dissident historical consciousness. The progressive reappropriation of this paradigm subverts collective representations and defines a singular apprehension of national and individual historicity. The opposition between the mnesic trace—which inscribes history into a place—and the prospective one—the starting point of a new tracing—lies at the root of the symbolical representations of the Old and the New Continents. In Twain's writings, these two forms of inscription correspond to two opposite modes of historicity—stasis and progress—and two political regimes—monarchy and democracy. Twain nevertheless subverts this symbolical polarity by revealing the stratification of American history. He thereby hints at a drift towards monarchy that results from the loss of the nation's founding principles. His fiction thus defines a historical economy in which the traces of the nation's origins appear to be inhabited by a principle of loss that may contaminate whoever attempts to appropriate them. The determinism of individual origins meanwhile suggests the closing down of history. To the deadly hold of the trace, his writings oppose the utopia of non- inscription – the principle of an escape from history and of a renewed coincidence with the origins. Yet the resurgence of unsolved tensions in Twain's late works converts the utopia into the staging of the abolition of history.

An examination of the persistent death motif in Twain's literature reveals a strong fusion of his art, personal experience and philosophical conclusions. Death imagery dramatizes Twain's pessimistic view of an estranged humanity existing without purpose or direction in an incomprehensible universe. Twain shows in his works that religious and social beliefs only obscure the fact that the meaning of death is beyond man's intellectual and perceptual powers. In Twain's view the only certainty about death is that it is a release from the preordained tragedies of existence. Illusions, primordial terrors, and mystifying dreams shape man's disordered reality, Twain concludes, and therefore death is as meaningless as life.

Who was Joan of Arc? That was the first question in my mind before I began my journey of studying this remarkable young woman. I had no idea how special she was. I thought she was just another historical figure that gets lost in history books. All I really knew about her was that she was burned at the stake. What I didn't know was that she led a country's army into battle at the age of seventeen.The adaptation of Mark Twain's novel, Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc into a full length play involves in-depth research into French and English society, religion, war strategy, The Hundred Years War and many other aspects that affected the young Jehanne d'Arc. Research also included in-depth study of the life of Mark Twain. After months of research, the playwriting process began. The process ending with new knowledge in playwriting, dramatic structure and a work that reflects how Joan of Arc can inspire an individual as a true heroine. A staged reading of the play, Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc, was presented on Monday, December 3rd, 2012 at the Next Door in Johnson City, Tennessee.

As the United States began to expand imperially beyond the continent, conflicts grew over control of what terms such as “America” and “American” represented—and how to depict them. The so-called “Golden Age of American Imperialism” spawned excited, jingoistic texts that asserted an American identity predicated on exceptionalism and beneficence. Meanwhile, protests arose from, and in, the margins of American literature. Though scholars have rigorously examined the fingerprints left by empire in U.S. culture and literature, we now need to dust for its protestors: the elements and aesthetics of the forces resisting it require further examination. “War in the Margins: Illustrating Anti-Imperialism in American Culture” demonstrates the interplay of grapheme, graphics, and propaganda integral to the anti-imperialist movement in American literature and culture. It argues that hybrid media was essential to anti-imperialist propaganda in the United States at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century. Beginning with Mark Twain's adventure novels and ending with W. E. B. Du Bois's work with the Crisis, “War in the Margins” analyzes intermedia dynamics to highlight how currents of empire play out between aesthetics and imperial politics across and through the page. Each chapter considers intergroup dynamics central to the annexation debates, relying particularly on visual theory, neoformalism, and humor studies, but also attending to book history, especially in the development of imaging technologies. I open by discussing the fluctuating space of home created by narratives in Mark Twain and Daniel Carter Beard's Tom Sawyer Abroad. The second chapter addresses the impact of humor and empathy on intergroup dynamics in Ernest Howard Crosby and Daniel Carter Beard's Captain Jinks, Hero. I move beyond the domestic in my third and fourth chapters. The third examines the use of photography and hybrid media in the battle between Mark Twain and King Leopold II, a conflict exemplified in King Leopold's Soliloquy and its response, An Answer to Mark Twain. The final chapter returns to the United States through the proto-modernist periodical work of Pauline Hopkins and W. E. B. Du Bois. I emphasize the ways textual aesthetics articulate national and international dynamics central to conceptions of what it means to be an American, concentrating on the ways aesthetic concerns amplify currents and voices that would ordinarily be marginalized. I contend that a close attention to multimodal aesthetics significantly contributes to discourses surrounding narratives of national and transnational communities and provides a deepened understanding of the struggles surrounding constructions of American citizenry.

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