Book chapter
Indian Knives and Color Lines: Mark Twain from Hannibal to the Jim Crow Raj
The Oxford Handbook of the Literature of the U.S. South
Oxford Handbooks of Literature, Oxford University Press
02/01/2016
DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199767472.013.10
Abstract
This chapter reads The Tragedy of Pudd’nhead Wilson (1894) and Following the Equator (1897) as linked commentaries on the problem of national and global whiteness. By examining the representation of India in Pudd’nhead Wilson, and the account of the U.S. South in the Indian section of Following the Equator, the chapter demonstrates that Twain’s fin-de-siècle internationalism often provoked fictional and autobiographical commentaries on unsettling memories of the peculiar institution that redounded to critiques of the imperial present. The heretofore neglected India-South dynamic in Twain’s late work testifies to his sense that Anglo-Saxonism constituted less a white man’s burden than a white man’s crisis.
Details
- Title: Subtitle
- Indian Knives and Color Lines: Mark Twain from Hannibal to the Jim Crow Raj
- Creators
- Harilaos Stecopoulos - University of Iowa
- Contributors
- Fred Hobson (Editor) - University of North Carolina at Chapel HillBarbara Ladd (Editor) - Emory University
- Resource Type
- Book chapter
- Publication Details
- The Oxford Handbook of the Literature of the U.S. South
- Publisher
- Oxford University Press
- Series
- Oxford Handbooks of Literature
- DOI
- 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199767472.013.10
- Language
- English
- Date published
- 02/01/2016
- Academic Unit
- English
- Record Identifier
- 9984398852002771
Metrics
9 Record Views