Beneath Mark Twain: Judgments of Justice and Gender in Twain's Early Western Writing, 1861-1873
type: CreativeWork
description: By the time Samuel Clemens began writing journalism and crafting what he called the “sensation hoax” for Virginia City’s Territorial Enterprise in 1862, Americans had been devouring sensational novels and journalism by such American writers as George Lippard, George Thompson, Ned Buntline, Emerson Bennett, and John Rollin Ridge for two decades. These writers, though only a few among many linked to the nineteenth-century Transatlantic genre of sensational fiction, were concerned with social reform in antebellum America, but they gained readership by writing tales about murderers and rapists. These male characters usurp the rights and freedoms of just but powerless men and symbolize the larger cultural anxieties of antebellum Americans living in growing cities. Lippard and Thompson wrote about such crime associated with disparate wealth distribution in the Metropolis, whereas Ridge and Bennett, for example, exposed racial and cultural violence in the American West. Indeed, Clemens, often writing as Mark Twain, combined all of these concerns in his early journalism and sensation hoaxes during the 1860s – state and personal justice, gender, class, race – while exploiting sensational literary depictions of violence that entertained readers but also encouraged readers to critique politics and the ethics of individual actions in the West. The purpose of this dissertation is not to write a history of the American West, nor to write a biography of Mark Twain. Rather, its primary aim is to describe Mark Twain’s sensational journalism and fiction, and his letters to friends and family, that responded to cultural anxieties about crime, punishment, and gender. My goals: to show Twain’s response to violence as a “philosophic observation,” rather than a standard news reporting. Though journalism imparted facts, Twain’s journalism also offered his personal philosophies, his observations, about morality, gender, and justice. With such observations, he became what we might call the “…
abstract: By the time Samuel Clemens began writing journalism and crafting what he called the “sensation hoax” for Virginia City’s Territorial Enterprise in 1862, Americans had been devouring sensational novels and journalism by such American writers as George Lippard, George Thompson, Ned Buntline, Emerson Bennett, and John Rollin Ridge for two decades. These writers, though only a few among many linked to the nineteenth-century Transatlantic genre of sensational fiction, were concerned with social reform in antebellum America, but they gained readership by writing tales about murderers and rapists. These male characters usurp the rights and freedoms of just but powerless men and symbolize the larger cultural anxieties of antebellum Americans living in growing cities. Lippard and Thompson wrote about such crime associated with disparate wealth distribution in the Metropolis, whereas Ridge and Bennett, for example, exposed racial and cultural violence in the American West. Indeed, Clemens, often writing as Mark Twain, combined all of these concerns in his early journalism and sensation hoaxes during the 1860s – state and personal justice, gender, class, race – while exploiting sensational literary depictions of violence that entertained readers but also encouraged readers to critique politics and the ethics of individual actions in the West. The purpose of this dissertation is not to write a history of the American West, nor to write a biography of Mark Twain. Rather, its primary aim is to describe Mark Twain’s sensational journalism and fiction, and his letters to friends and family, that responded to cultural anxieties about crime, punishment, and gender. My goals: to show Twain’s response to violence as a “philosophic observation,” rather than a standard news reporting. Though journalism imparted facts, Twain’s journalism also offered his personal philosophies, his observations, about morality, gender, and justice. With such observations, he became what we might call the “…
author: Roark, Jarrod
language: en_US
date published: 2013
date modified: 2026-07-24T05:19:15Z
provider: University of Missouri - Kansas City
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: University of Missouri--Kansas City

PropertyValue
property ID: Handle
value: https://hdl.handle.net/10355/47468