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

     Messent, Peter.  _Mark Twain_.  New York: St. Martin's Press, 1997.
     (Modern Novelists.)  Pp. ix + 235.  Includes notes, bibliography,
     index.  Cloth, 5-1/2" x 8-3/4".  ISBN 0-312-16479-3.

The dust jacket reads:

     This book provides an overview of Mark Twain's work and a close
     critical analysis of his major texts, and includes chapters on
     _Huckleberry Finn_, _A Connecticut Yankee_ and _Pudd'nhead Wilson_.
     Using recent cultural and literary theory to re-examine Twain's
     travel writing and fictions, and written in a refreshingly jargon-
     free and accessible manner, Peter Messent begins by discussing one
     of Twain's oddest but most comic short stories, 'The Stolen White
     Elephant'.  This tale of an elephant on the loose, causing havoc
     wherever it goes, and hunted by the logical but myopic Detective
     Blunt, serves as a revealing point of entry to Twain's narratives
     as a whole, with their stress on shifting perspective, incongruity
     and constant undecideability.

     The book focuses on Twain's attitudes to Europe and the American
     West, and discusses his representations of boyhood, race relations,
     capitalist expansion, and technology.  Twain's work reflects
     anxieties both about changes in the social and industrial order in
     post-Civil War America and the status of the individual subject
     within it.  His moves between different genres and his formal
     difficulties, which were to result eventually in the unfinished
     stories of his late career, must be seen in the light of such
     anxieties.

     The clear and incisive analyses of individual texts, together with
     the siting of those texts in terms of the larger issues of realism,
     fantasy, modernization, and personal and cultural identity, will
     make this a particularly valuable book for students.  It offers a
     long-overdue comprehensive and stimulating reassessment of Twain's
     remarkable body of work.

     The author: Peter Messent is Reader in Modern American Literature
     at the University of Nottingham.  He is the author of _New Readings
     of the American Novel_ and _Ernest Hemingway_.  He is at present
     editing a book on postwar American crime fiction.

As usual, the review must be of publishable quality, and it would be due
within two months of your receipt of the book (i.e., due mid-June 1997).
The deadline is particularly important, as we are making every effort
for Forum reviews to appear before print reviews.  If you are inclined
to procrastinate, please don't offer to review the book.

If you would like to see the general content and style of Forum book
reviews, feel free to browse the reviews that have so far appeared,
which are available under the "reviews" link at TwainWeb, at the
following URL:

     http://web.mit.edu/linguistics/www/forum/twainweb.html

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 <[log in to unmask]>
Coordinator, Mark Twain Forum