Mark Twain's Geographical Imagination

Horace J. Digby joins authors and Mark Twain scholars to study

Mark Twain's Geographical Imagination

Edited by Joseph A. Alverez,

Mark Twain's

Geographical Imagination



A team of contributing authors examines the work,  times, and geographical imagination of Samuel Langhorne Clemens, aka

Mark Twain . . .

Mark Twain once wrote:

"The human imagination is much more capable than it gets credit for. This is why Niagara is always a disappointment when one sees it for the first time. One's imagination has long ago built a Niagara to which this one is a poor dribbling thing. The ocean "with its waves running mountain high" is always a disappointment at first sight; the imagination has constructed real mountains, whereas these with swelling at their very biggest and highest are not imposing. The Taj is a disappointment though people are ashamed to confess it. God will be a disappointment to most of us, at first. I wish I could see the Niagaras and Tajs which the human imagination has constructed, why then, bless you, I should see Atlantics pouring down out of the sky over cloud ranges, and I should see Tajs of a form so gracious and a spiritual expression so divine and altogether so sublime and so lovely and worshipful that—well—St. Peter's, Vesuvius, Heaven, Hell, everything that is much described is bound to be a disappointment at first."

                                   —Mark Twain's Notebook

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Edited by Joseph A. Alverez

with chapters by:

Joseph A. Alverez

    Mining Literary Ore from Physical

    and Imaginative Travels

John Bird

    Metaphors of North and South,

    East and West in Mark Twain's

    The private History of a Campaign

    That Failed

John Davis

    Bridging the Gap: The Twin

    Kingdoms of The Prince and the

    Pauper

Horace J. Digby

    Roughing It: Mark Twain's

    Geography of the West, Imagined

    and Real

David Kesterson

    Revisiting the Significance of Mark

    Twain's Hawaiian Sojourn

Sandra Littleton-Uetz

    The Illinois Side of Mark Twain

Charles Martin

    Tom Sawyer's Lessons in Geography;

    or, The Holy Land as Flapdoodle in

    Tom Sawyer Abroad

Janice McIntire-Strasburg

    Mark Twain, Huck Finn, and the

    Geographical "Memory" of a Nation

Jeffrey Alan Melton

    Seeing the River: Mark Twain's

    Landscape Imagination

Mark Woodhouse

    The Stranger in Paradise: Dollis Hill,

    Florence, Dublin, and Samuel

    Clemens' Creative Imagination

Tracy Wuster

    "Interrupting a Funeral with a Circus":

    Mark Twain, Imperial Ambivalence,

    and Baseball in the Sandwich Islands.