The Mark Twain Forum needs a reviewer for the following book:

     Randall Knoper.  _Acting Naturally: Mark Twain in the Culture of
     Performance_.  Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995.  Pp.
     ix + 240.  $35.00.  Cloth, 6-1/2" x 9-1/4".  ISBN 0-520-08619-8.

The jacket describes it thus:

     The phenomenon of performance is central to Mark Twain's writing
     and persona.  But Twain's performative aspects have usually been
     dismissed as merely theatrical and discounted as lowbrow burlesque.
     In _Acting Naturally_, Randall Knoper takes Twain's theatricality
     seriously, situating it in the culture of nineteenth-century
     popular performance ranging from blackface minstrelsy to the
     exhibitions of mesmerists and mediums.  In so doing, he shows how
     Twain's work both echoes and engages the social and cultural
     problems embodied in such entertainments--the breach between high
     and low cultures, the uncertain signs of authenticity and
     sincerity, crises in the public presentation of gendered and racial
     selves, and the economics of commodities and their conspicuous
     display.

     Drawing on a wide array of interrelated contexts, such as theater
     history, theories of acting and bodily expression, new
     understandings of psychology and physiology, scientific accounts of
     spiritualism, and experiences of urban and commercial spectacles,
     Knoper demonstrates how carefully Twain used ideas of "acting" and
     the "natural" to explore expression and creativity.  Twain
     understood representation itself in terms of the continuum of
     performance, from mimicry and theatrical effect to unconscious
     slips of body and tongue.  His preoccupation with performance, and
     its extremes of posing and authenticity, led Twain deeply into
     nineteenth-century anxieties about the security of meaning and of
     sexual, racial, and social identity.

     By examining the many issues attending "performance" in Mark
     Twain's writings and American culture, _Acting Naturally_ provides
     a new understanding of Twain as an artist as well as a view of a
     culture whose entertainment registered the social, economic, and
     scientific forces that were transforming it.

If you're interested in writing this review, please send me both your
home and institutional mailing addresses and phone numbers.  If I don't
already know you, it would be helpful for you to explain in what respect
you're qualified to write this review.  (If we haven't exchanged e-mail
recently, it might be a good idea for you to remind me of this info.)

I look forward to hearing from you.

Taylor Roberts
Coordinator, MT Forum