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The author suggests three major cultural transformations which best describe the writing of Mark Twain: capital, culture, and education. The second one is tackled in detail in this chapter. This is aided by a discussion on one of the novels of Mark Twain, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876). This chapter shows how this novel brings into collision the commodity aesthetic with a narrative voice built in response to one of the earliest languages of the expert. A discourse on boyhood in emerging forms of middle-class manhood is also presented. Subchapters include a discussion on nostalgia and play, on how to rightly construct boys, and talking about Injun Joe. The “problem of Injun Joe” as a sign of Twain's own ambivalence is given light, as is his role as a domestic entertainer.

This chapter describes Mark Twain's Hannibal, the physical setting of his most famous novels, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huck Finn, and his inspiration for countless others. Hannibal is the place where Twain grew up, where he shared the experiences of his two famous characters, Tom and Huck. Twain considered the town as a microcosm of America, living proof of its guilt and shame, and triumph and achievements. The chapter, using experiences while travelling to and within Hannibal, then traces the history of John Berry Meachum, a prominent slave turned free black reformist in neighboring St. Louis, Missouri, as a prologue to a discussion on slavery in the South, and its manifestations in Twain's hometown. The chapter describes the town as a tourism hotspot for Twain fans and relates her conversations with contemporary town members of their views on Twain's philosophy and works.

Finally, education as one of the three major cultural transformations, along with capital and culture, as seen in the works of Mark Twain, is explicated in this fourth and final chapter. This chapter serves as a point of departure by dealing with the Adventures of Tom Sawyer as a conclusion to the study. The author argues that the novel enacts a parody of Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography, since Twain's novel begins with the characterization of an illiterate boy writing his own autobiography. This constitutes Mark Twain's most profound entry in his own autobiography of authorship. The verge of authorship is talked about in this chapter, as well as the autobiography and the making of the literate author. The chapter ends with some “fighting words.”

Clemens's first novel, The Gilded Age, which he coauthored with Charles Dudley Warner, is a notable exception to this general pattern. His family members served as models for major characters, but Clemens did not closely identify anyone in the book. His father's insolvency and the grinding poverty of his childhood years were reflected in the book. The main focus of the book is directed upward to the folly of the larger public but Clemens's considerable moral energy in the novel seldom turned inward upon himself. In channeling his anger outward toward others he avoids a personal self-reckoning on the same highly charged issue. The Gilded Age is in contrast to the book The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. It is a social and political satire of decidedly adult nature, while The Adventures of Tom Sawyer is a rural and highly autobiographical idyll written for and about children.

This chapter studies the characters of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn in Mark Twain's The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885). Twain used Tom Sawyer to celebrate American democracy in its centennial year, but nine years later, he used Huckleberry Finn to lament the countries' self-betrayal through racial and cultural slavery. Despite the books' reputations as exuberant declarations of independence, both Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn are more about confinement and enclosure than freedom. Twain imagines freedom in these books more as a resistance to various kinds of imprisonment than as a state of being to be explored and affirmed in itself.

Hilary Iris Lowe begins this volume with an examination of literary tourism in her essay on the Mark Twain Boyhood Home and Museum in Hannibal, Missouri. Lowe argues that until recently, the town’s history has taken a backseat to the “historic sites” related to the literary characters that were part of Twain’s fiction. The story of Tom Sawyer, Becky Thatcher, and “Nigger Jim” has long drawn tourists to Hannibal, which, as Lowe shows, became a place where fiction and history have been conflated as one in order to preserve the income-producing tourism that benefits the town.

Fiction can show how one thinks through an issue or problem, and it can show what seems in life to be the vital necessity of incomplete, inconsistent, nonsystematic thinking. The answers that attracted Clemens with this kind of thinking cannot be found in any overtly autobiographical books but in Tom Sawyer, where he drew copiously on personal experience but under the liberate premise of fiction. In the book, Huck and Tom witnessed Injun Joe stabbing Dr. Robinson and convincing Muff Potter that he is the murderer. For Tom, fear gives way to guilt over his failure to speak on Potter's behalf. Clemens's emotions are reflected in more than a dozen chapters in which he labors to conceal the saving truth for himself and others.

Deciphering the figure of “The Author” in the Talmud, the chapter develops a framework of analysis, where it actively engages the resources – the approaches and theories – of Talmud criticism while broadening the context of inquiry to include conflicting rhetorical and philosophical understandings of what it means to remember and what role thinking may play in memory. The chapter identifies aporias arising from associating the thinking in the Talmud with a person, such as “The Author.”

Samuel Clemens Pollit-Stead's composite figure of Charles Dickens and Mark Twain as petit-bourgeois paterfamilias and socialist booster of the 1930s allows her to explore, at once critically and imaginatively, the cultural meanings that Dickens and Twain took on in their historical afterlives. Typically, Dickens and Twain have been brought together for contrast. From the beginning, Twain's originality was set against the Dickensian imitativeness of Bret Harte, 8 and if the project that led to Tom Sawyer bore some relation to David Copperfield, that relation was burlesque. James Cox has strikingly remarked on the disappearance of Dickens's early pseudonym, “Boz” while “Mark Twain” wholly displaced Samuel Clemens. To take this seriously requires that they will re-conceptualize the books and authors they study. It requires abandoning “literature” as an autonomous sphere of aesthetic contemplation and it requires instead thinking about “media” as potentialities for mediation between the parties in particular.