 | Heretical Fictions: Religion in the Literature of Mark Twain Challenging the prevailing belief that Mark Twain's position on religion hovered somewhere between skepticism and outright heresy, Lawrence Berkove and Joseph Csicsila marshal biographical details of Twain's life alongside close readings of his work to explore the religious faith of America's most beloved writer and humorist. They conclude not only that religion was an important factor in Twain's life but also that the popular conception of Twain as agnostic, atheist, or apostate is simply wrong. Heretical Fictions is the first full-length study to assess the importance of Twain's heretical Calvinism as the foundation of his major works, bringing to light important thematic ties that connect the author's early work to his high period and from there to his late work. Berkove and Csicsila set forth the main elements of Twain's "countertheological" interpretation of Calvinism and analyze in detail the way it shapes five of his major books-- Roughing It , The Adventures of Tom Sawyer , Adventures of Huckleberry Finn , A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court , and No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger --as well as some of his major short stories. The result is a ground-breaking and unconventional portrait of a seminal figure in American letters. Lawrence I. Berkove is a professor emeritus of English at the University of Michigan-Dearborn. He is the editor of The Fighting Horse of the Stanislaus (Iowa), The Sagebrush Anthology: Literature from the Silver Age of the Old West , and The Best Short Stories of Mark Twain and coeditor of The Short Fiction of Ambrose Bierce, as well as numerous articles on Twain's major novels, short fiction, travel literature, religious values, and the Sagebrush School associates. Joseph Csicsila is a professor of English at Eastern Michigan University. He is the author of Canons by Consensus: Critical Trends and American Literature Anthologies , co-editor of Centenary Reflections on Mark Twain's No.44, The Mysterious Stranger , and of the Prentice Hall Anthology of American Literature, editor of The Gilded Age , and review editor of the Mark Twain Annual . |
