I'd nominate a couple of younger Twainologists too, although for my money
Louis Budd is still the Dean.

Forrest Robinson's _In Bad Faith_ is a strong & provocative reading of
_Tom Sawyer_ and _Huck Finn_ in a social, economic, & to some extent
linguistic context.  In a culture w/ slavery at its core, lies are the
predominant social language, & Tom's language consists largely of modes
of lying.

James Johnson's _MT and the Limits of Power_ traces Emersonian "power
figures"
through T's texts, including late ones like "No. 44, the Mysterious
Stranger."
Please don't run wild citing this book, though, or all the Twain-Emerson
linkages I'm talking about in my own dissertation will suddenly look like
very old news....

Susan Gillman's _Dark Twins_ is excellent on _Pudd'nhead Wilson_ and on T's
recurrent ambivalences generally.

Jeff Steinbrink's _Getting to Be MT_ lies on my shelf still unread, but
everyone's saying great things about it.

Maria Marotti's _Duplicating Imagination_ is an interesting foray into
post-structuralist readings of the later Twain Papers.  The Twain world is
gradually becoming safe for theory, if some of the papers & conversations
last week in Elmira are any indication.  The theory world still isn't onto
MT yet, which is their oversight & their loss.  Since Twainologists are
on the whole much better prose writers than theorists, having that
inevitable
convergence proceed from *this* side is cause for celebration.

[That last sentence got syntactically dreadful and the tyranny of the
carriage return keeps me from cleaning it up.  I'm saying, or trying to say,
that T'ologists are better prose writers *than theorists are*.  Apologies to
anyone who took it as an attempt to denigrate Twain scholars' grasp of
all the current Isms.  Nothing of the kind intended.]

Anyway, those are just the first few that come to mind, among some of
the recent books I have within arm's reach of this computer.  Hope they're
of some interest, and not only to other dissertators.

Bill Millard
Rutgers