Cosmopolitan Twain /

Taking aim at Mark Twain's embedded position as mythic chronicler of America's rural heartland, Ryan (LeMoyne College) and McCullough (Univ. of Nevada, Las Vegas) assert instead a "cosmopolitan" Twain. Ryan's cogent introduction proffers an urban, proto-modernist Twain whose peripatetic life on a global stage complicates enduring critical and popular efforts to "locate" him as a regional and national writer. Eight innovative, thoughtful essays by the editors and other well-known Twain scholars (among them Bruce Michelson, Peter Messent, James Caron) generate fresh, useful approaches to Twain's work through the lens of cities in which Twain lived, visited, or sojourned: New York, San Francisco, Buffalo, St. Louis, Hartford, London, Vienna. Thus resituated "within the landscape of American cultural history," Twain emerges yet again as a paragon of paradox: both detached and engaged, both transnational and local. In a concluding chapter, Michael Kiskis claims Quarry Farm as central to Twain's translation of travel into literature. In doing so, he--and this volume--offer promising directions for assessing diverse theories of cosmopolitanism and Twain's own "place" within them. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty. S. K. Bernardin SUNY College at Oneonta