Hello all, A couple of years ago Rick Hill and I placed our initial call for papers on the forum. Since then, we've accepted a number of essays, but we could use one or two more that have not been previously published. A couple of prospective publishers have expressed an interest in the book, but we came up short in total number of pages. Our proposal and table of contents are below. If you'd like to contribute, please let me know. I'm heading out on vacation tomorrow, but I'll be back at the end of the month to answer questions. Thanks! Jim Mark Twain Among the Scholars: Reconsidering Contemporary Twain Criticism edited by Richard Hill and Jim McWilliams Introduction Contemporary critics have too often concerned themselves with various sub- and extra-literary questions about Mark Twain--whether he practiced "bad faith" in his work, whether he abdicated his social responsibility and subverted his genius to the status quo of the Gilded Age, whether he was a plagiarist, an opportunist, a racist, a sexist, an imperialist, a drunkard, a psychopath, a homosexual, a pedophile-and so on to the latest scholarly revelation. We found that the more outrageous the claim about Twain or his work the more recognition the author received, not only from academic journals but from the mainstream press as well. What was missing from much of contemporary Twain criticism was a willingness to approach him without a firm agenda in place. Were there other scholars out there who also found much of the current Twain criticism distasteful? We decided to find out. We searched journals, placed calls for papers in various publications, and put out an Internet call via the Mark Twain Forum. Subsequently, we put together this collection of essays that takes a skeptical look at many of the current fads in Twain criticism. Audience This book will appeal to two audiences: 1) Twain scholars and advanced college students who have been involved on one side or another of the debates generated by New Historicist, psychoanalytic, autobiographical, or other modern critical approaches; 2) College teachers and undergraduate students (as well as advanced high-school students) puzzled by the uncritical acceptance in academia of various critical assertions about Twain and his work. Length Chapters: Ten essays at 15-35 manuscript pages each Book: Approximately 250 manuscript pages Table of Contents Introduction* Louis Budd Introduction to The True Adventures of Huckleberry Finn** John Seelye 1 Mark Twain and the New Americanists* Glen M. Johnson 20 Overreaching: Critical Agenda and the Ending of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn*** Richard Hill 36 Personally Speaking: Mark Twain and the "Autobiographical Critic"* Harold K. Bush, Jr. 66 Mark Twain as He Is Taught: American Literature Anthologies, 1919-1998* Joseph Csicsila 86 Focused Too Well for Irony: Pudd'nhead Wilson and its Modern Critics** Henry B. Wonham 113 In His Own Time: The Early Academic Reception of Mark Twain* L. Terry Oggel 134 The Crowded Raft: Huckleberry Finn & Its Critics** J. C. Furnas 152 How Many Children Had Huckleberry Finn?*** Gary P. Henrickson 169 *Unpublished essay **Previously published; reprint rights secured or pending ***Previous published but revised and updated Jim McWilliams