Explore the vast range of titles available.

The Jester and the Sages approaches the life and work of Mark Twain by placing him in conversation with three eminent philosophers of his time—Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud, and Karl Marx. Unprecedented in Twain scholarship, this interdisciplinary analysis by Forrest G. Robinson, Gabriel Noah Brahm Jr., and Catherine Carlstroem rescues the American genius from his role as funny-man by exploring how his reflections on religion, politics, philosophy, morality, and social issues overlap the philosophers' developed thoughts on these subjects. Remarkably, they had much in common. During their lifetimes, Twain, Nietzsche, Freud, and Marx witnessed massive upheavals in Western constructions of religion, morality, history, political economy, and human nature. The foundations of reality had been shaken, and one did not need to be a philosopher—nor did one even need to read philosophy—to weigh in on what this all might mean. Drawing on a wide range of primary and secondary materials, the authors show that Twain was well attuned to debates of the time. Unlike his Continental contemporaries, however, he was not as systematic in developing his views. Brahm and Robinson's chapter on Nietzsche and Twain reveals their subjects' common defiance of the moral and religious truisms of their time. Both desired freedom, resented the constraints of Christian civilization, and saw punishing guilt as the disease of modern man. Pervasive moral evasion and bland conformity were the principal end result, they believed. In addition to a continuing focus on guilt, Robinson discovers in his chapter on Freud and Twain that the two men shared a lifelong fascination with the mysteries of the human mind. From the formative influence of childhood and repression, to dreams and the unconscious, the mind could free people or keep them in perpetual chains. The realm of the unconscious was of special interest to both men as it pertained to the creation of art. In the final chapter, Carlstroem and Robinson explain that, despite significant differences in their views of human nature, history, and progress, Twain and Marx were both profoundly disturbed by economic and social injustice in the world. Of particular concern was the gulf that industrial capitalism opened between the privileged elite property owners and the vast class of property-less workers. Moralists impatient with conventional morality, Twain and Marx wanted to free ordinary people from the illusions that enslaved them. Twain did not know the work's of Nietzsche, Freud, and Marx well, yet many of his thoughts cross those of his philosophical contemporaries. By focusing on the deeper aspects of Twain's intellectual makeup, Robinson, Brahm, and Carlstroem supplement the traditional appreciation of the forces that drove Twain's creativity and the dynamics of his humor.

Homicidal Economics in Mark Twain: Legacies of American Theft , by Catherine Carlstroem, examines the roles and representations of money—economic valuations, definitions, and transactions—within the context of two critical economic events in nineteenth century America: the culmination and virtual completion of Native Americans' dispossession, and the existence and abolition of race-slavery. I focus on four of Mark Twain's major works: Roughing It, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Life on the Mississippi and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. My thesis, greatly simplified, is that Twain's work is profoundly informed by particularly disturbing aspects of the national economy, the homicidal-economy . His vision of economics is fundamentally, irrevocably altered by the twin realities of American economics, particularly pointed for a Southerner from Missouri: stolen land and stolen labor. It thereby encompasses a range of interpenetrating issues: the Civil War, murder, violence, racial prejudice, theories of racial difference—the civilized and savage—supporting economic exploitation, the authority of law, property rights, theft, and the influence of economic valuation on humanistic values. My study necessarily generalizes to adapt to these complexly related parts, using a broad definition of economic, including economic models of framing an issue—profit and loss, risk and investment—even with no strictly financial subject. Indeed, Twain employs this language regularly to describe interpersonal, political, and religious interactions. The word money serves as shorthand for several different but closely related and frequently conflated things: currency, the different species of money like gold and coins, which are symbols of exchange value; property and wealth, which currency represents; ownership as a concept, and its logical compliment—robbery. The foundation of my method is close-textual analysis, with attention to the historical/cultural context of the works, and to a lesser extent, its biographical context. Since bonds between the larger U.S. homicidal economy and economics in Twain's texts are sometimes submerged or overlaid, visible only with dose inspection, I rely on the emergence and repetition of patterns, and the intersection of these within and among the texts to reinforce my argument, so that it has a cumulative power beyond the individual interpretations of specific sections and subjects.