Reviewed by: The Content of Our Caricature: African American Comic Art and Political Belonging by Rebecca Wanzo Henry B. Wonham Rebecca Wanzo. The Content of Our Caricature: African American Comic Art and Political Belonging. New York: New York UP, 2020. 245 pp. $29.00. Rebecca Wanzo begins her study of African American comic art and political belonging by contemplating an image that captures the not-so-subtle dynamic at the heart of her project. A caricatured Thomas Jefferson sits at his writing desk at Monticello, penning the sacred opening lines to the Declaration of Independence, “We hold these truths to be self-evident,” while an even cruder caricature of a “pickaninny” cries from outside the window behind him, “Daddy, I’m cold” (1). Further in the background and less distinctly, an overseer on horseback raises his whip and prepares to strike a helpless Black woman. There is nothing subtle about [End Page 132] the meaning of the image, and yet Wanzo points out that artist Kyle Baker’s careful management of perspective pushes real violence into a succession of receding backgrounds, each one more visually indistinct and more shrouded in typification than the last. The “pickaninny” figure in this image, not to mention the turbaned woman in the distance, repeats a racist cliché, and one might object (as, indeed, several of Wanzo’s Facebook interlocutors did) that no amount of irony deployed in the arrangement of these images can undo their fundamental significance as tokens of racial inferiority and political exclusion. Yet this is precisely the question that animates Wanzo’s fascination with African American comic art: Can racist caricatures perform “disruptive critical work” (2)? Her sweeping study of cartoons by African American artists from the early twentieth century to the present makes a powerful case for answering, “Yes, they can.” While caricatures of Black people in the United States always deal in “pain” and have historically been “a way of inflicting injury,” she explains, the manifestation of that pain within the comic image “may be doing other work than, or something more than, the injury” (220). This “more than”—as it emerges from largely forgotten comics by early artists and continues through the Black Panther comics and their popular film adaptation of more recent years—is the focus of Wanzo’s study, which deserves to be acknowledged as the field’s most provocative account of African American comic art to date. Each of Wanzo’s chapters aims a distinct thematic lens at the history of comic representations of and by African Americans. In “ ‘Impussanations,’ Coons, and Civic Ideals: A Black Comics Aesthetic,” she looks back to George Herriman’s “Krazy Kat” and forward to contemporary artists Jeremy Love and Valentin De Landro to explain the role of caricature in depicting the African American body as a particular kind of “problem,” one that places “the past, present, and future on the same page” (65). Here and throughout her discussion, Wanzo’s eloquent delineation of a Black comic aesthetic hinges on the question of whether patently racist representations can project a liberatory impulse. Her second chapter, “The Revolutionary Body: Nat Turner, King, and Frozen Subjection,” interrogates this question by measuring the distance from Thomas Nast’s nineteenth-century images of African American sublimation to depictions of two revolutionary Black figures in graphic biographies by Baker and Ho Che Anderson. Chapter three dives further into Baker’s graphic œuvre by examining his Black Captain America comic-book miniseries, Truth: Red, White & Black, written by Robert Morales. By placing Baker’s Captain America figure in conversation with depictions of African American soldiers during World War II, Wanzo develops the idea of a melancholic citizenship aesthetic, which may be her most compelling demonstration of how the dehumanizing energies of racial caricature get repurposed in contemporary comic art by African Americans. Chapter four concentrates on images of Black children in the work of Ollie Harrington, Dwayne McDuffie, M. D. Bright, Brumsic Brandon, Jr., Aaron McGruder, and Jennifer Cruté. While they are anything but household names, these artists participate in an emotionally charged discourse on American childhood, one that deploys “cuteness” or a “cute aesthetic” as an imperfect mask for suffering and injury (168). As...

This essay argues that late nineteenth-century American fiction, as exemplified by William Dean Howells’s The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885) and Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie (1900), is entangled in the period’s embrace of a new understanding of economic conditions, one premised on the significance of consumer data as the raw material of economic interpretation and fixated on mathematical analysis as a source of knowledge about value. Marginalism in economic theory and realism in American literary practice were contemporaneous efforts to mediate value at a moment of decisive transition in America, as a model of commodity-centered competitive capitalism yielded to the regime of corporate finance. The young academic economists of the period and their literary counterparts explained the economic landscape in much the same way and to many of the same ends. Both began with the daunting question of how to reimagine value in a world characterized by fictitious goods and increasingly abstract financial instruments, a world in which the labor theory of value seemed hopelessly outdated. Both responded to this challenge by proposing novel intellectual procedures for making values appear stable again by focusing on the subjective experiences of consumers. Finally, both marginalists and realists sought to provide a quasi-scientific bedrock for fixing values in consumer society not only by appealing nostalgically to an economy of actual goods and honest work but more importantly by accommodating readers, policy makers, and stakeholders of all kinds to the new realities of finance capitalism.

Mark Twain was greatly influenced by the comic writers of what is called the “Old Southwest”: Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, and Arkansas. These writers were most often professional men — doctors, lawyers, and other professions — and often from outside the region, producing comic sketches that were intended for a national audience. They often employed a frame device: a sophisticated, genteel outer narrator who introduces the scene and the setting, followed by an unsophisticated, vernacular narrator who tells his story, in dialect. The sketches included bawdy humor, violence, irreverence, and subversion, of which the genteel outer narrator expresses disapproval. The major writers of Southwestern humor included Augustus Baldwin Longstreet, George Washington Harris, Thomas Bangs Thorpe, and Johnson Jones Hooper, all of whom Samuel Clemens read in his formative years. Many of Twain’s early comic sketches followed the formula of the framed narrative, most notably his first national successful publication, “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County.” Twain’s major achievement was to invert the form by calling into question his role as the genteel outer narrator: the vernacular inner narrator is often celebrated. Twain’s experiments with the form were important in his development as a writer but also in the development of realism.

This essay explores the concept of liberal guilt in William Dean Howells's fiction, focusing especially on his 1888 novel Annie Kilburn. Genealogies of liberal guilt rarely mention Howells, and yet no American writer has more painstakingly elaborated the embarrassing predicament of middle-class complicity in social arrangements that entail the widespread suffering of others. I provide a summary of theoretical positions on liberal guilt as a structure of feeling that entails what Richard Rorty calls "doubt about [one's] own sensitivity to the pain and humiliation of others, doubt that present institutional arrangements are adequate to deal with this pain and humiliation." Howells felt these doubts profoundly, and yet he understood liberal guilt as a productive emotional and intellectual predicament. Put simply, Howells viewed liberal guilt, like realism itself, as an attitude of resigned acceptance of persistent social injustices but an attitude capable of animating, rather than dissipating, liberal commitments and public agendas.

Mark Twain and Ida Tarbell, the muckraking journalist, may have shared a certain instinct for the disclosure of sham and corruption—and hence a certain claim to status among writers of something loosely defined as realism—but one of them was entirely welcome within the private executive offices of the Standard Oil Trust, while the other launched a literary crusade against the very same company. The literary history of American realism is inseparably tangled up in these contending arguments over the compatibility or incompatibility of laissez-faire capitalism and public welfare. Walter Benn Michaels, whose The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism remains after thirty years one of the most provocative approaches to that intersection, believes that American literary realism stands inherently at odds with the era's emerging culture of high finance.

Within the Mark Twain industrial complex, there exists a thriving cottage industry devoted less to the analysis of Samuel L. Clemens's literary works than to the study of what was arguably his most enduring and significant creation, the public persona known as Mark Twain. Lou Budd's Our Mark Twain: The Making of His Public Personality (1983) is a classic of the genre, as are Jeffrey Steinbrink's Getting to Be Mark Twain (1991) and Andrew Hoffman's Inventing Mark Twain: The Lives of Samuel Langhorne Clemens (1997). A more recent manifestation of the theme is Twain's Brand: Humor in Contemporary American Culture (2012), Judith Lee's illuminating study of the most famous literary trademark ever to adorn the covers of an American book. Joining this robust conversation is Tracy Wuster, whose excellent new tome is an attempt “to understand what it meant for Mark Twain to be a humorist in his own time, and to explore what ‘humor’ signified and encompassed for different audiences of the Gilded Age” (5). As this introductory declaration suggests, Wuster is less interested in the meaning of Mark Twain's literary texts than in the development of his reputation from roughly 1865 to 1882, as he transformed himself from an edgy California humorist into a regular contributor to the eminently respectable Atlantic Monthly.A large part of this story of professional transformation entails Clemens's deliberate acts of self-fashioning, as he honed his lyceum performance style and his literary voice to meet the demands of an expanding and increasingly East–Coast audience. Another large part of the story has to do with the critical debates that followed Mark Twain everywhere he went and that made him a focal point of the period's culture wars. Wuster is at his best in recreating the “rough critical terrain in which critics varied widely over whether Mark Twain [possessed] literary merit or whether he was merely a passing whim of a debased public” (4). By reproducing rich samples of contemporary criticism, Wuster reminds us that the very name Mark Twain was a flashpoint for disagreements about the significance of American humor as a cultural phenomenon.Sam Clemens's road from sagebrush bohemian to respectable author entailed four major stops, as Wuster narrates the journey. The first stage “had been characterized by his appearance as a newspaper reporter, magazinist, and lecturer in California—‘the Wild Humorist of the Western Slope,’ which culminated in the success of his jumping frog” (356). A second phase in the development of the persona “was marked by his ascension to national and international fame as an ‘American Humorist’ and his transition from peripheral figure to central exponent of the unique and peculiar school of a distinctly national humor—‘the best of our second-rate humorists’” (356). At this point in his career, roughly coincident with the publication of The Innocents Abroad (1869), critics routinely compared Mark Twain with Artemus Ward, Petroleum V. Nasby, and other irreverent literary comedians of the period, but a large rung was reserved at the top of the humor hierarchy for those considered the true purveyors of American wit: Oliver Wendell Holmes and James Russell Lowell in particular. Mark Twain ascended to that final rung during the third phase of his development, as he “moved into new venues in which he might be considered, in the words of his most important promoter [William Dean Howells]—‘quite worthy of the company of the best’” (356). During the fourth and final stage, which Wuster links to publication of A Tramp Abroad (1880) and The Prince and the Pauper (1882), “Mark Twain's work was discussed largely in relation to his earlier work, rather than in relation to other humorists” (356). Fittingly, Howells at this point drops the impulse to compare his friend with even “the best,” insisting in 1882 that Mark Twain has become “the most popular humorist who ever lived” (356).Wuster narrates this process of ascension to cultural respectability with admirable thoroughness and insight, though it is hard to deny that the basic story is entirely familiar. Other scholars have tilled this ground before, often with finer instruments and a keener eye for interpretive possibilities. Mark Twain's relationship with various strains of American humor is the province of several foundational works, such Kenneth Lynn's Mark Twain and Southwestern Humor (1972) and David E. E. Sloane's Mark Twain as a Literary Comedian (1979), not to mention more recent studies that have added to our understanding of his early journalistic career, such as James E. Caron's Mark Twain: Unsanctified Newspaper Reporter (2008). On the question of Mark Twain's stage career, which occupies much of Wuster's attention, one cannot help thinking of the archival work of Fred Lorch and the bracing insight of Randall Knoper's Acting Naturally: Mark Twain in the Culture of Performance (1995). By contrast, Mark Twain: American Humorist offers what might be considered a big picture of the stage and literary persona that these other critics have approached on a more detailed and local level, and Wuster's study is therefore a useful starting place for readers who are new to Mark Twain studies. For those interested in a more refined understanding of Mark Twain's art and comic persona, this study may serve more as a primer than as a source of new discovery.

Book Review| April 01 2017 Artistic Liberties: American Literary Realism and Graphic Illustration, 1880–1905 Artistic Liberties: American Literary Realism and Graphic Illustration, 1880–1905. By Adam Sonstegard. Tuscaloosa: Univ. of Alabama Press, 2014. xiv + 230 pp. Cloth, $49.95. Henry B. Wonham Henry B. Wonham University of Oregon Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google American Literary Realism (2017) 49 (3): 296–297. https://doi.org/10.5406/amerlitereal.49.3.0296 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Henry B. Wonham; Artistic Liberties: American Literary Realism and Graphic Illustration, 1880–1905. American Literary Realism 1 January 2017; 49 (3): 296–297. doi: https://doi.org/10.5406/amerlitereal.49.3.0296 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveUniversity of Illinois PressAmerican Literary Realism Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright 2017 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois2017 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Hank Morgan thinks of himself as an instigator of the first industrial revolution, but his career in Camelot more accurately maps onto a late nineteenth-century revolution, one that witnessed the decline of the profit-driven entrepreneur and the rise of the corporate oligarch whose interest was less in establishing a competitive advantage among rivals than in maintaining price and currency stability across the economy. The novel grapples more seriously than critics have realized with this transition and with a changing conception of money that accompanies the rise of the corporate regime. A seemingly innocuous object, something Hank calls the miller-gun, plays an important role in this story about the emergence of economic stability as an aspiration among corporate and political leaders of the 1880s and '90s.

This selection of essays presents the "biographies" of ten well-known writings by some of the most inventive authors in American literature. From Mark Twain to Ken Kesey, Edith Wharton to Eudora Welty, these influential writers have helped shape the American literary imagination.

William Dean Howells's The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885) is usually approached as a representative text in the American realist mode and an unambiguous expression of Howells's disdain for in Walter Benn Michaels's words-"the excesses of capitalism," especially as embodied in the novel's rendering of "the greedy and heartless stock market." Like many commentators of the period, Howells promoted a traditional view of honest industry against the emerging phenomenon of speculative finance, and yet to read the novel as an allegory of opposition to Wall Street speculation is to oversimplify Howells's complicated attitudes toward high finance and to make a caricature out of the novel's treatment of complex economic developments. In this essay, I reassess Silas's investment career and the novel's surprisingly dense engagement with the dynamics of securities trading as a form of commerce. Critics such as Michaels and Neil Browne have contended that through Silas's failed investment career, Howells "attempts to disarticulate ... an emergent market ethos," but as I read the novel this same "market ethos" is inseparable from Howells's conception of realism and of the vocation of the literary realist.

Henry B. Wonham, “Realism and the Stock Market: The Rise of Silas Lapham” (pp. 473–495) William Dean Howells’s The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885) is usually approached as a representative text in the American realist mode and an unambiguous expression of Howells’s disdain for—in Walter Benn Michaels’s words—“the excesses of capitalism,” especially as embodied in the novel’s rendering of “the greedy and heartless stock market.” Like many commentators of the period, Howells promoted a traditional view of honest industry against the emerging phenomenon of speculative finance, and yet to read the novel as an allegory of opposition to Wall Street speculation is to oversimplify Howells’s complicated attitudes toward high finance and to make a caricature out of the novel’s treatment of complex economic developments. In this essay, I reassess Silas’s investment career and the novel’s surprisingly dense engagement with the dynamics of securities trading as a form of commerce. Critics such as Michaels and Neil Browne have contended that through Silas’s failed investment career, Howells “attempts to disarticulate…an emergent market ethos,” but as I read the novel this same “market ethos” is inseparable from Howells’s conception of realism and of the vocation of the literary realist.

Book Review| October 01 2016 Mark Twain: The Gift of Humor Mark Twain: The Gift of Humor, by Harold H. Kolb, Jr. Lanham: University Press of America, 2015. 504 pp. Cloth, $100.00. Henry B. Wonham Henry B. Wonham University of Oregon Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google American Literary Realism (2016) 49 (1): 92–94. https://doi.org/10.5406/amerlitereal.49.1.0092 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Henry B. Wonham; Mark Twain: The Gift of Humor. American Literary Realism 1 October 2016; 49 (1): 92–94. doi: https://doi.org/10.5406/amerlitereal.49.1.0092 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveUniversity of Illinois PressAmerican Literary Realism Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright 2016 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois2016 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Henry B. Wonham visited Quarry Farm for two weeks in September of 2014. His research there included work on several projects, including a history of Mark Twain's experiences in the Adirondack Mountains.

After putting down two powerful new assessments of US realism—Andrew Lawson's Downwardly Mobile: The Changing Fortunes of American Realism (2012) and Nathaniel Cadle's The Mediating Nation: Late American Realism, Globalization, and the Progressive State (2014)—it is hard not to be reminded of James Carville's 1992 campaign motto, a linchpin of the Clinton ascendancy: “It's the economy, stupid.” Many smart Americanists of the last 30 years have insisted that American realism is essentially a meditation on the meaning of life under the regime of US-style capitalism, but the appearance of Lawson's and Cadle's books signals a new era in the field's maturing appreciation that it really is “all about the Benjamins”—to borrow another hackneyed pop-culture slogan. Together, these two books suggest what is possible when well-informed literary and economic analysis meet to reassess the print culture of an era punctuated by seismic financial transformations. In their vastly different outlooks, however, these two studies also demonstrate the need for theoretical resources beyond those offered by Marx, who continues to loom, sometimes unproductively, over accounts of economic experience among scholars of US realism. Lawson demonstrates that Marx can still teach us something about the mimetic urge that grows up in reaction to the dematerializing tendencies of a money economy, but Cadle's study takes us someplace genuinely new in aligning the major practitioners of realism with a broad cultural “reorientation toward the state as a means of empowering Americans to harness emerging modes of transnational circulation” (7). Giovanni Arrighi has a larger role to play than Marx in this conversation about the role of print media in the ascendancy of the US economic system and “the transfer of global hegemony from Europe to North America,” and thinkers such as Louis Brandeis, Randolph Bourne, and W.E.B. Du Bois help Cadle link major writers of the period to a Progressive spirit that Marx would have found deeply problematic (7). Cadle may not go far enough in exploring the literary implications of the transnational turn in US realism, but his book is a provocation that scholars interested in the economic underpinnings of the field should carefully consider.

In this essay, I argue that an image of regular returns on invested capital played a profound role in Mark Twain’s imagination, informing not only his conception of financial well-being for himself and his family, but his understanding of literary creativity itself. To observe the operations of unearned income both in Twain’s fiction and as Twain’s fiction is to encounter a different version of Mark Twain, Business Man than the one we knew.

Journal Article Twain's Brand: Humor in Contemporary American Culture Get access Judith Yaross Lee. (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2012. xiv, 226 pp. $60.00.) Journal of American History, Volume 100, Issue 4, March 2014, Pages 1210–1211, https://doi.org/10.1093/jahist/jau051 Published: 01 March 2014

Research Article| September 01 2014 Introduction: Mark Twain and Economy Henry B. Wonham Henry B. Wonham Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google American Literary Realism (2014) 47 (1): 1–3. https://doi.org/10.5406/amerlitereal.47.1.0001 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Henry B. Wonham; Introduction: Mark Twain and Economy. American Literary Realism 1 January 2014; 47 (1): 1–3. doi: https://doi.org/10.5406/amerlitereal.47.1.0001 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveUniversity of Illinois PressAmerican Literary Realism Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright 2014 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois2014 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.