The Gilded Age named an era of capitalist excess in the United States and, one hundred and fifty years after its first publication, Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner’s account of an American society characterized by corporate corruption and vast disparities of wealth and privilege continues to be relevant, as the new HBO series makes abundantly clear. The papers we’ve selected from the many submissions we received in response to our call all offer exciting new readings of The Gilded Age.

Our panel clearly demonstrates the ongoing importance of this novel, and the concepts it introduced. Our first speaker, Kathryn Dolan (Missouri University of Science and Technology), offers an innovative reading of the novel’s perspective on resource extraction, connecting its investigation to contemporary concerns about climate change. In “A Greenwashed Age: The Twain/Warner Tale in the Twenty-First Century,” Dolan shows that “the lessons taught in The Gilded Ageremain valid at a time of dramatic revaluations of natural resources—with a new, green focus. In addition, applying The Gilded Age to a future period has precedent. After all, in this novel, Twain and Warner effectively satirize a period of US culture that hadn’t even happened yet, to the point of naming that period. In this way, the authors can also be read as anticipating a “Greenwashed Age,” one in which the abuse of land and the continued victimization of marginalized peoples predominate.”

Roshan Chowdhury (University of Massachusetts-Amherst) likewise offers a radically new reading of the novel, linking it to the Sepoy Rebellion of 1857. Exploring the connections created by the use of the word “Indian” to characterize persons from South Asia as well as Native Americans, Chowdhury’s paper, “Anticolonial rebellions in India, Inter-imperial Network, and Transnational Co-formation in Nineteenth-Century U.S. Literature,” correlates fears of rebellion, whiteness, and the era Twain and Dudley depict in The Gilded Age.

Our final panelist, Jessica Jordan (Stanford University), will present “Gilding the Late Nineteenth Century: The Gilded Age as Subscription Novel.” Focusing on book production, Jordan will show that “book production, in turn, was itself a defining characteristic of the Gilded Age. Contemporary commentors lamented the “flood of books” washing across the country, drowning the unwary in a sea of paper and ink. One major channel for the flood’s waters was subscription bookselling, a method John Tebbel estimates was responsible for up to two-thirds of all books sold between 1870 and 1900. But despite subscription bookselling’s popularity, critical attention to the practice has been largely limited to one author: Mark Twain. And it is here that The Gilded Age makes its second claim to fame, as the “first” novel sold by subscription in the United States. But, as I will show, this claim is inaccurate, perpetuated by scholarly neglect of the possibilities of the subscription book market and a misunderstanding of fiction’s place in this popular mode of distribution. Uniting book history and literary analysis, this paper will elucidate The Gilded Age’s subscription context, showing how the novel’s form is closely connected to its mode of circulation and exposing the gendered biases which have contributed to Twain’s historical and critical dominance of the topic for so long.”