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Though many of the traits Smith points out here seem racist and reductive, the art, to her mind, seems equally disposed toward evenhanded renditions of any group’s distinguishing features. ” Taking Ameri­can literary works from 1880 to 1905—and, in the case of 26 Introduction Harriet Beecher Stowe, works reprinted during that interval—I examine representations of uncomfortable lives for comfortable readers when socioeconomics, gender, and “race” differentiate their comfort levels. ” Twain also had his way with Huckle­ berry Finn when Twain allowed Edward Windsor Kemble’s illustrations to spread across increasingly pictorial pages, so that Twain’s text had more of a chance to reflect its hero’s increasing sense of equality.

Kap­ lan’s Howellsian “democracy in literature” “contests, in the name of the social whole, the elitist maintenance of an insular and exalted culture. Yet realism equally opposes the rise of popu­lar mass culture which unites people as consumers through the medium of the market” (21). For Michael Davitt Bell, “a prominent function of claiming to be a realist or a naturalist in this period was to provide assurance to one’s society and one’s self that one was a ‘real’ man rather than an effeminate ‘artist’” (6).

3 As Kemble’s rewording troubles the title, his images collude with Twain’s ruse of authorship. Most books, one would assume, identify their authors by name. This one never actually mentions Samuel Clemens but refers exclusively to Mark Twain. Most books, at least in Twain’s day, depict the author in a dignified pose in a frontispiece. 2). Most title pages would again credit the author. ” It consigns Twain to a sculptural bust by Karl Gephardt, which is reproduced in a heliotype and inserted on onion­skin paper between the frontispiece and the title page.