Heretical Fictions:Religion in the Literature of Mark Twain

"Every now and then a book comes along that illuminates Mark Twain's literature like a lighting flash, startling us about how casually we have overlooked a fundamental truth. Heretical Fictions is such a work, boldly redrawing the map of Twain studies and ingeniously tracing a vital path of thought that underlies his major writings."---Alan Gribben, author, Mark Twain's Library: A Reconstruction

"I balked a little when I read that `religion was a main concern of Twain during his entire life,' but Berkove and Csicsila soon brought me round to their point of view. This is in good part because they are not interested in listing biblical allusions and splitting theological harirs. Rather, they stick to the high ground and bring nuanced literary perceptions to their task. Their theological foundation is strong, as is their feel for the importance of religion in Twain's America, and they make clear that Twain was a Calvinist in his basic understanding of God, heaven, hell, free will, and human nature. They make an original and compelling case for the defining significance of religion in the works of Mark Twain."---Forrest Robinson, author, In Bad Faith: The Dynamics of Deception in Mark Twain's America.

"An important contribution to Twain studies, Heretical Fictions offers a provocative argument for the centrality of Calvinist religious thought in Twain's works that will surely spark significant debate. While readers may balk at some of their conclusions, Berkove and Csicsila offer close readings of Twain's major fiction that overall mount a formidable and compelling case for the pervasiveness of his struggles with---and against---the implications of a Calvinist worldview. Their reading reveals a coherent thematic structure that undergirds some of Twain's most apparently episodic major fiction, but more importantly, it offers an intriguing explanation for many of Twain's apparently contradictory stances during his lifetime....Heretical Fictions argues cogently that the apparent pessimism of Twain's last ten years was not the morbid preoccupation of an aging and embitterd man but the compassionate culmination of a lifelong quest to test the reluctant conclusions of a `God-haunted mind.'"---Sharon D. McCoy, University of Georgia

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: Stories and Essays by Dan De Quille (Iowa 1990), 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 author of numerous artiecles on Twain. 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, coeditor 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