Print Culture, Queer Form, and Mark Twain’s No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger

Abstract

This essay examines the multiple connotations of form in Mark Twain’s posthumously published manuscript No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger. The idea of form has several registers in the manuscript—most notably, as a technical referent in the print shop and as the source of characters’ anxieties regarding their gendered bodies. I argue these connotations work together as part of the manuscript’s innovative reckoning with the literary conventions of narrative form. Yet Twain’s meditation on narrative form also advances an ambiguous understanding of sexual identity and economic fantasies about technological disruption.