The following is a forwarded message from Wesley Britton in response to issues raised regarding his recent Forum book review. As Wesley has no access to the Forum at this time, I am acting as intermediary. Replies or further comments may be directed to Wesley Britton at the address at the end of this message. KJB ***************************************************************** To Laura Skandera-Trombley Re: My review of _Mark Twain's Humor: Critical Essays_ First, sorry it's taken so long to respond to your comments; I'm not on the Internet and only hear Forum news through a friend. Second, Taylor didn't write the review. I did. My "brush off" of your essay was not intended to demean the essay itself--as I said, it did not, however, seem to fit within the stated scope of the volume. Like many other fine pieces in the collection, your work is useful, informative, and insightful but is miscast under what I consider a misleading book title. Like Shelley Fisher-Fishkin's excellent study, your piece addressed important issues only marginally related to humor. If the book were entitled _Mark Twain's Critical Reputation_, _Changing Critical Responses to Mark Twain_ or something far more general, the volume would make more sense, although quite a few little pieces would still be unnecessary. Most of my comments addressed the surprising inclusion of material, rarely damning the material itself. This is why I invoked the dreaded "political correctness" prerogative--if the work was not a critical essay on humor, why was it included? I did indeed get the impression David was attempting to "touch all the bases," so an essay on feminine issues sans criticism of humor did seem more a nod to current critical hotpoints rather than choosing work addressing the ostensible topic of the book. Again, this is a matter of out-of-sync inclusion rather than a complaint with the material itself. I profited by reading your essay on its own merits--my criticism is primarily addressed to the confusing editorial policies. For what it's worth, I'm glad my ideas are supported by others who've independently described the volume as "thin" and "vastly overpriced." Again, no specific author has been called into question but rather the oddly assorted and repetitive miscellany in which they appear. In brief, in terms of defining "political correctness," I think the term's meaning has changed over the years. When I first heard it regarding literary discussion, the focus was on what was to be included in the "canon" and how was literature to be taught. I think some very healthy and important changes came about from this, for lack of a better word, movement. But with every movement comes excess. Ask Alan Gribben. The current vogue of damning white male culture in toto, tendencies to filter writers and their works through contemporary social standards, and thin-skinned censorship of vernacular vocabulary tend to go overboard. I think the last two conferences in Hartford addressing only racial issues were PC, and so are discussions of Andy Hoffman's faulty syllogisms. Because a minority is invoked, he gets more mileage out of his PC gossip in this political environment than he would at any other time because he touches a contemporary hot button, not Mark Twain. His logic is less than Leslie Fiedler who thought Huck and Jim were gay but on a par with one discussion at Hartford three years ago when some folks decided Twain MUST have slept with black women, how else could he have portrayed Roxy so convincingly? If spiritualists were en vogue, we'd have to deal with those who count Twain among their number because he spoke to them from beyond the grave. I don't accuse you of any of this. Still, in your letter to me, you complain of an "obvious" dearth of female biographers/ scholars of Twain. The same is true of black scholars (judging from the participation at Twain gatherings) and disabled scholars of which I'm the only one I'm aware of in regards to Twain. What difference does it make? Good scholarship is good scholarship no matter who writes it. I don't give a hoot who the author is of any given study and think gender, race, national origin etc. is irrelevant, although I admit Eastern studies of American Literature come from a very different context. I've just completed a comparison of Hawthorne's _House of the Seven Gables_ with Toni Morrison's _Beloved_ (forthcoming in _Nathaniel Hawthorne Review_) and I'm neither black nor female and don't need to be to understand issues important to either group. When such limiting demands on a scholar's background do become relevant, that is PC excess fragmenting our consciousness. Besides, the number of outstanding female Twain scholars has risen dramatically since the days Gladys Bellamy was the lone representative in the first Twain conference in the photo Ham Hill showed us at the last Elmira get-together. And I'm glad for that. I do think studies of Twain's relationships with women and his treatment of them in his works are extremely important, and, from what I can see, ARE topics being explored rather frequently, and I say they are long overdue. It seems clear such issues, alongside those of race, are a dominant theme in current Twain scholarship. I think Livy's reputation has been greatly improved in recent years, Twain's relationships with his "home circle," Angelfish, and female friends IS continually being explored, and more certainly can be and should be done. Your work and Susan Harris', in particular, has contributed much to the Twain critical canon. I look forward to future studies on the subjects you name, no matter who writes them. (Sounds like a subject for a good anthology of critical essays. Worth considering?) Wesley Britton 1202 S. Walnut Sherman, TX 75090