Possibly of some interest is Henry Wonham's _Mark Twain and the Art of the Tall Tale_ (1993). As I recall, Wonham stresses the importance of a male discourse community in Clemens's work, like the pilots swapping tales in the pilot house in "Old Times on the Mississippi," and suggests that this community is the imagined audience for most of his fiction, even when such a community is not actually described. Charles Crow