… has four chapters and roughly covers Mark Twain's career, examining most of the major …
1 , "Mark Twain and the Escape from Sense," begins with a free-wheeling look at Mark Twain's …

… , if only to jar a reader loose from many fashionable categorizations: showing … Mark Twain's
work," this study presents Twain as "the best escape artist in the American canon," as a writer …

… A reader archaeologizing on that great, always rising tumulus, the kitchen midden of
scholarship on Mark Twain, soon turns up some durable beliefs. Among what may be called …

… -the frenetic energy-of Twain's comedy. For example, the "… ized past; and the latter presumes
to construct a self "on … a joke on Mark Twain as a credulous listener, a joke on us as we play …

… critics of Mark Twain who have tried to enshrine Twain as a … "heresies to suggest about Mark
Twain as personage, as text, … Michelson has insisted that we not forget that Mark Twain was …

… Mark Twain on the Loose presents a Mark Twain who is wilder, more anarchistic than he
appears in most scholarship. (The approach is announced even by the startling cover …

… comic style, perspective, and presence; and each in its own way helps us in the process of
rediscovering or reinventing Mark Twain … speaks to and for Americans especially. Reinventing …

… recuperating Twain's comic power, Bruce Michelson significantly contributes to our
understanding of Twain's humor in Mark Twain on the Loose: A Comic Writer and the American Self …