Twain World, Twain’s Worlds

Mark Twain occupies a complex, often contradictory place in American culture: at once an icon of American exceptionalism, and yet also an artist who traffics in and on the murky waters of American history. Twain has become a rich text through which American identity is filtered, interpreted, commodified, and revised.

The Literature/Film Association invites submissions for a three-person panel exploring proliferations, performances, and adaptations of Mark Twain’s life, literature, and legacy in American culture, as part of Elmira 2026: The Tenth International Conference on the State of Mark Twain Studies. The three-day conference, hosted by the Elmira College Center for Mark Twain Studies, will take place on the Elmira College campus in Elmira, NY, from Thursday, July 30th through Saturday, August 1st. More infomation on the conference and the related Quarry Farm Graduate Student Workshop “From Seminar Paper to Academic Article” is available here: https://marktwainstudies.com/2026quadrennial/. 

While we invite proposals that broadly speak to cultural and intertextual readings of Twain, areas of special interest may include:

• Contemporary textual adaptations of Twain or his fiction.
• Explorations of the myth of originality, relative to an artist who relied on the vernacular/folk art sources
• Twain and literary tourism and worldbuilding
• Twain as both character and stage
• Subversive, transgressive responses to the icon of Twain, and the iconography of “Twain World”

Please submit expressions of interest or proposals directly to Kyle Meikle (kmeikle@ubalt.edu) by Friday, February 13th.