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