New Essays on Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Describes the publishing history and contemporary reception of the novel and discusses Huckleberry Finn's style, language, and rhetoric

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Huck Finn s America

A provocative, deeply researched investigation into Twain's writing of Huckleberry Finn challenges basic understandings to argue its reflection of period fears about youth violence, education, pop culture and parenting. 35,000 first printing.

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The Mark Twain Encyclopedia

This reference guide is designed for anyone interested in Samuel L. Clemens. Around 740 entries, arranged alphabetically, are a collection of articles, covering a variety of topics pertaining to this American author's life.--[from preface].

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Mark Twain and the Brazen Serpent

Focusing on the overarching theme of religious satire in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, this study reveals the novel's hidden motive, moral and plot. The author considers generations of criticism spanning the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries, along with new textual evidence showing how Twain's richly evocative style dissects Huck's conscience to propose humane amorality as a corrective to moral absolutes. Jim and Huck emerge as archetypal twins--biracial brothers who prefigure America's color-blind ideals.

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Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Literary criticism of Twain's greatest work.

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The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Race in America

Traces the process and influences behind the writing of Mark Twain's novel, Huckleberry Finn, which was published in the late nineteenth century and has been banned frequently since then for his use of racial epithets or simply for being coarse.

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The Critical Response to Mark Twain s Huckleberry Finn

The Critical Response to Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn contains articles, reviews, and scholarly essays spanning the period from the original publication of the novel in 1885 to the present. The collection reflects the major literary trends and issues of response to the book--such as persistent attempts to ban it, literary criticism concerning its ending, and many thematic interpretations. Among essayists included are literary figures such as T. S. Eliot and Twain scholars Walter Blair, Leo Marx, and James Cox. Champion provides an introductory overview on the range and issues of critical response, a feature on adaptations of Huckleberry Finn, and a bibliography of additional scholarship.

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Huckleberry Finn as Idol and Target

If racially offensive epithets are banned on CNN air time and in the pages of USA Today, Jonathan Arac asks, shouldn’t a fair hearing be given to those who protest their use in an eighth-grade classroom? Placing Mark Twain’s comic masterpiece, Huckleberry Finn, in the context of long-standing American debates about race and culture, Jonathan Arac has written a work of scholarship in the service of citizenship. Huckleberry Finn, Arac points out, is America’s most beloved book, assigned in schools more than any other work because it is considered both the “quintessential American novel” and “an important weapon against racism.” But when some parents, students, and teachers have condemned the book’s repeated use of the word “nigger,” their protests have been vehemently and often snidely countered by cultural authorities, whether in the universities or in the New York Times and the Washington Post. The paradoxical result, Arac contends, is to reinforce racist structures in our society and to make a sacred text of an important book that deserves thoughtful reading and criticism. Arac does not want to ban Huckleberry Finn, but to provide a context for fairer, fuller, and better-informed debates. Arac shows how, as the Cold War began and the Civil Rights movement took hold, the American critics Lionel Trilling, Henry Nash Smith, and Leo Marx transformed the public image of Twain’s novel from a popular “boy’s book” to a central document of American culture. Huck’s feelings of brotherhood with the slave Jim, it was implied, represented all that was right and good in American culture and democracy. Drawing on writings by novelists, literary scholars, journalists, and historians, Arac revisits the era of the novel’s setting in the 1840s, the period in the 1880s when Twain wrote and published the book, and the post–World War II era, to refute many deeply entrenched assumptions about Huckleberry Finn and its place in cultural history, both nationally and globally. Encompassing discussion of Harriet Beecher Stowe, Frederick Douglass, Ralph Ellison, Archie Bunker, James Baldwin, Shelley Fisher Fishkin, and Mark Fuhrman, Arac’s book is trenchant, lucid, and timely.

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What is a Book

In What Is a Book? David Kirby addresses the making and consuming of literature by redefining the four components of the act of reading: writer, reader, critic, and book. He discusses his students, his work, and his practice as a teacher, writer, critic, and reader, and positions his theories and opinions as products of "real" life as much as academic exercise. Among the ideas animating the book are Kirby's beliefs that "devotion is more important than dissection" and "practice is more important than theory." Covering an impressive range of writers--from Emerson, Poe, and Melville to James Dickey, Charles Wright, Richard Howard, Susan Montez, and others--Kirby considers the evolution of critical theory from the nineteenth century to the late twentieth and explores the role of criticism in contemporary culture. Drawing from his experience writing poetry and reading to children at a local housing project, he answers two of his four central questions: "What is a reader?" and "What is a writer?" In the largest section of the book, "What Is a Critic?," Kirby demonstrates his passionate engagement with the function of the critic in literary culture and offers both overviews and close examinations of literary theory, book reviewing, and the historical background of criticism from its earliest beginnings. In the final section of the book, he addresses the question "What is a book?" with an examination of the reading preferences of older readers. Kirby's analysis of those responses, along with his own notions of the literary canon, is an insightful excursion into how books are valued. Deeply learned and wonderfully entertaining, What Is a Book? is a lucid look at the whole of literary culture. Kirby makes us think about the books we love and why we love them.

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Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

A photographic facsimile of the first issue of the first edition, in 1885, of the adventures of a young boy traveling down the Mississippi River with an escaped slave.

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American Novel Explication 1969 1980

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Osiris N

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The Historian s Huck Finn Reading Mark Twain s Masterpiece as Social and Economic History

Putting Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in historical context, connecting it to pivotal issues like slavery, class, money, and American economic expansion, this book engages readers by presenting American history through the lens of a great novel. • Presents Twain's book as a historical novel that brings up key historical issues both in the antebellum period in which the novel is set and in the post-Reconstruction period in which it was written • Identifies how Huckleberry Finn underscores perhaps the cruelest aspect of slavery: the involuntary separation of husbands, wives, and children from each other • Ideal reading for college and high school students taking American history classes as well as general readers with an interest in American history, Mark Twain, or both • Provides extensive annotations that are useful, accessible, and interesting to readers without specialized knowledge of 19th-century history

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Black White and Huckleberry Finn

"Black, White, and "Huckleberry Finn" shows that the argument over black-white relations in the novel is also an argument over nonfictional ones - over black images in white minds, conflicting perceptions of racial harmony, and differing interpretations of the American dream."--BOOK JACKET.

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David Mamet s Glengarry Glen Ross

The 12 original and two classic essays offer a dialectic on performance and structure, and substantially advance our knowledge of this seminal playwright.

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The Art of Huckleberry Finn

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The Annotated Huckleberry Finn

Mark Twain's classic novel about the experiences of a boy who runs away from home with a fugitive slave is supplemented by extensive literary and historical commentary

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A Place Called Home

The dynamic Midwestern small town---from its idyllic beginnings to its imminent decline--explored and celebrated in thirty-four selections of cultural history, fiction, and poetry, both classic and contemporary.

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Mark Twain The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

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The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Now that he is rich, everyone wants to civilise Huck Finn, but he decides that he cannot stand it; he stages his own murder and, with runaway slave Jim, goes booming down the Mississippi on a raft-free of clothes, school, money and other adult inventions-and the greatest adventure story in American literature begins.

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