Reviewed by: The Reverend Mark Twain: Theological Burlesque, Form, and Content Harold K. Bush Jr. The Reverend Mark Twain: Theological Burlesque, Form, and Content. By Joe B. Fulton. Columbus: Ohio State Univ. Press, 2006. xiv + 228 pp. Cloth, $41.95. Cultural interest in religion and spirituality is a growth industry in early twenty-first-century America, and literary scholars of the American nineteenth century are re-examining the profoundly Christian underpinnings that the post-World War II generation of Americanists not only took for granted, but utilized in many of their most influential studies. This phenomenon is beginning to assert itself in the scholarship on major authors like Mark Twain, who is most commonly remembered as openly castigating religion. An example of how a religious approach can open up new vistas upon well-trodden ground is fully on display in Joe B. Fulton's The Reverend Mark Twain. It is an accessible attempt to understand Twain as a writer powerfully influenced by the religious cultures of his day. The major attention is on matters of literary form, particularly in terms of Twain's reliance upon religious forms such as prophecy, catechism, jeremiad, apocalypse, hagiography, doxology, or dialogue. This reliance sometimes amounts to an effort at maintaining the form, and at other times is a conscious burlesque of the form. Each chapter attempts, generally speaking, to show how a particular work by Twain operates within a particular literary form. Often Fulton will focus on one particular text, but illustrate it with many others. The result is most often an original and fairly readable analysis of various works that enlightens and pushes forward how we think about these texts. Some scholars might not be too enthusiastic about such an emphasis on form these days. Fulton is correct to say that ideological or content-driven analysis has pretty much held its ground for a couple of decades now, and that his own approach founded on form criticism is decidedly in the minority. However, I can say without hesitation that Joe Fulton is a recognized authority on Twain and that this work aims pretty high. His career has been very impressive so far and his attention to matters of religion in Twain is already well-known, marking him as one of the leaders in this emerging field. [End Page 91] The argument proceeds in the preface and first chapter by discussing in detail Twain's reliance on religious forms, and his resistance to the claims of heterodox, "wildcat" religions that venture too far away from the mainstream of orthodoxies. The discussion of wildcat as a symptom of Twain's interest in orthodoxy is terrific. The opening chapter presents excellent material on various forms like parody and burlesque; and such religious forms as jeremiads, catechisms, sermons, and the like. The theoretical premise of the book is based largely on M. M. Bakhtin—as in Fulton's first book, Mark Twain and Ethical Realism. Together, these volumes would be quite suggestive to the many readers of ALR who are pursuing new theoretical lenses through which American realism might be understood. For instance, Fulton is occasionally quite animated and eloquent regarding recent critical interest in a text's content, to the exclusion of a coinciding interest its form. He is obviously singling out a major critical ignorance among today's literary scholars—the ignorance of form and of formal analysis—that is the result of over twenty years of the domination of content alone and the critical approaches that privilege content. As such, the desire to theorize what he calls a more "organic" approach, drawing equally from a work's content and form, is timely. As such, Fulton is himself using a religious form—the jeremiad—in calling us back to the roots of our joint enterprise: close literary analysis of both form and content. In general, he is also correct to point out the relative lack of discussion of Twain's engagement with religion—especially compared with the more politically charged topic of race, for instance, which has been perhaps the dominant theme in Twain studies for over fifteen years now. Putting all of this introductory material together, he offers a brilliant reading of the overlooked...
Read full abstract
Oct 1, 2016
Charles Lwanga Noora + 8
Open Access