| This dissertation analyzes the intersection of two important forces in the nineteenth-century United States: regionalism as a cultural and historical paradigm and the literary career and personality of Mark Twain. While each of these forces has often been considered independently, the influence of each upon the other has not been fully recognized. I have sought to recover the central role that regional sensibility played in nineteenth-century American culture, and in so doing to set the stage for my reading of Twain as a self-conscious product, observer, and shaper of regional and national attitudes in the United States.; My first chapter seeks to recapture and recontextualize the significance of regionalism in the nineteenth-century United States, to reconstruct a concept of region that signified not only a physical geography but also a cultural geography--one composed of the ideas and stereotypes by which regions knew themselves and were known by others. I have tried to present a moment in American history where "region" was, even more than "nation," a concept Americans believed in and understood.; Each of the subsequent four chapters treats one of four Twain books: Roughing It (1872), The Gilded Age (1873), Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889). These books provide rich insights into the regional component of Twain's work; they are examined chronologically so as to provide perspective on the changes and developments in Twain's treatment of regional issues over the course of his career.; Finally, I consider the ways in which the concepts of "region" and "nation" were related in the nineteenth-century United States. As the century drew to its close, the impulse to transcend regional identity and to affirm national identity was strong. Twain, for one, grew increasingly intrigued with the question of national identity. Crafting a national vision out of various regional sensibilities, he created characters and images that represented an America in which his readers wished to believe. |
