Acting Naturally

The phenomenon of performance is central to Mark Twain's writing and persona. But Twain's performative aspects have usually been dismissed as theatrical and discounted as lowbrow burlesque. Randall Knoper takes Twain's theatricality seriously and shows how Twain's work both echoes and engages the social and cultural problems embodied in nineteenth-century popular entertainments.
Knoper draws on theater history, theories of acting and bodily expression, psychology and physiology, scientific accounts of spiritualism, and commercial spectacles to demonstrate Twain's use of "acting" and the "natural" in his creative explorations. This book enlarges our understanding of Mark Twain—the artist and the man—and also provides a window into a culture whose entertainments registered the sexual, racial, economic, and scientific forces that were transforming it.

Randall Knoper is Associate Professor of American Literature and American Studies at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.