Mark Twain Forum Reviews: Mark Twain’s Geographical Imagination, Edited By Joseph Alvarez

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Mark Twain’s Geographical Imagination. Joseph A. Alvarez, ed. Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009. Hardcover, 167 pages. $58.95. ISBN: 978-4438-0585-8.

This collection of essays edited by Mark Twain scholar Joseph A. Alvarez was inspired by a 2005 South Atlantic Modern Language Association (SAMLA) conference session. The session was organized by Morehouse College professor Eileen Meredith, who coined the title of the session that this book uses. Then of Central Piedmont Community College in Charlotte, North Carolina, Alvarez was not involved in that session, but he nevertheless took up a suggestion from Cambridge Scholars Publishing (no relationship to Cambridge University Press) to shape a book around the subject of Mark Twain’s writings on geography. In June 2006, he posted a call to the Mark Twain Forum listserv for papers on Mark Twain’s individual travel writings. The result was this collection of ten essays, including two originally presented by Jeffrey Melton and Charles Martin at the SAMLA conference. When the book was published in late 2009, it received sparse publicity and no reviews and then quickly fell out of print. However, in a stroke of good luck for those who failed to find a copy previously, the book is now once again listed on amazon.com and a request to the publisher for a review copy was promptly answered.

The book’s cover features a popular cartoon of Mark Twain standing atop a laughing globe that appeared on 22 December 1900 in the New York Commercial Advertiser. It was signed by a cartoonist with the initials LWM whose identity remains unknown in spite of several queries over the years on the Mark Twain Forum to solicit assistance in providing his or her name.

Alvarez begins the volume with his introduction titled “Mining Ore from Physical and Imaginative Travels.” Therein he observes that Mark Twain’s geographical imagination took him back almost 2000 years to the Garden of Eden–when he wrote the Adam and Eve diaries–and carried him into time travel, heaven, and various fantasy spaces.

Contributors to the volume include several names familiar to members of the Mark Twain Forum. Among them is John Bird, author of the book’s first essay, “Metaphors of North and South, East and West in Mark Twain’s ‘The Private History of a Campaign that Failed'” (pp. 7-16). Calling attention to the tendency of many readers to overlook the fact that much of Mark Twain’s story is fiction, Bird sees that Civil War story to be “about confusion over directions, and even more deeply, about confusion over war in general and war writing in particular” (7). He goes on to show how Mark Twain used the story as a sort of corrective to northern views of published accounts of the war–an implicit criticism, perhaps, of the Century magazine series of wartime memoirs in which the piece first appeared.

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The Mark Twain Forum Review Editor is Barbara Schmidt.