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.

Arac does not want to ban Huckleberry Finn, but to provide a context for fairer, fuller, and better-informed debates. He 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.

Much about Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is ageless, yet its author was completely immersed in the age in which he wrote. Refiguring “Huckleberry Finn” looks at ways that contemporary American culture and history influenced the formation of Mark Twain’s masterwork. It also shows how the novel reflects Twain’s deep investment in what Carl F. Wieck calls “an open-minded, unbiased perception of the wellsprings of the American spirit.” Clearly, Twain knew the Mississippi River and its people well. With Frederick Douglass, William Dean Howells, Ulysses S. Grant, and John Hay (Abraham Lincoln’s personal secretary) among his friends, Twain also knew America. That understanding, Wieck shows us, is richly evident in Huckleberry Finn by the ways Twain explored themes of justice, rights, knowledge, and truth; engaged with the ideas of Douglass, Lincoln, and Thomas Jefferson; and expressed concern over the public discourse on race and equality. In addition, in discussions that range from number play in the novel to the symbolic potential of the Mississippi’s awesome, one-way flow, Wieck looks closely at Twain’s storytelling craft. Filled with new and challenging insights, Refiguring “Huckleberry Finn” reintroduces us to one of our greatest novels and one of our finest novelists.

Huck Finn's 'Hidden' Lessons questions the educational suitability of 'The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn' in the classroom. The author argues that the book teaches misguided lessons about race relations. Huck Finn's 'Hidden' Lessons challenges the more typical understanding of Huck Finn and guides readers through an analysis that demonstrates how racism functions in the book and the classroom.

You don't know about me, without you have read a book by the name of "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer", but that ain't no matter. So begins, in characteristic fashion, one of the greatest American novels. Narrated by a poor, illiterate white boy living in America's deep South before the Civil War, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is the story of Huck's escape from his brutal father and the relationship that grows between him and Jim, the slave who is fleeing from an even more brutal oppression. As they journey down the Mississippi their adventures address some of the most profound human conundrums: the prejudices of class, age, and colour are pitted against the qualities of hope, courage, and moral character. Enormously influential in the development of American literature, Huckleberry Finn remains a controversial novel at the centre of impassioned critical debate. This edition discusses all the current issues and the evolution of Mark Twain's penetrating genius. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

The thirteen essays in this collection combine to offer a complex and deeply nuanced picture of Samuel Clemens. With the purpose of straying from the usual notions of Clemens (most notably the Clemens/Twain split that has ruled Twain scholarship for over thirty years), the editors have assembled contributions from a wide range of Twain scholars. As a whole, the collection argues that it is time we approach Clemens not as a shadow behind the literary persona but as a complex and intricate creator of stories, a creator who is deeply embedded in the political events of his time and who used a mix of literary, social, and personal experience to fuel the movements of his pen. The essays illuminate Clemens's connections with people and events not usually given the spotlight and introduce us to Clemens as a man deeply embroiled in the process of making literary gold out of everyday experiences. From Clemens's wonderings on race and identity to his looking to family and domesticity as defining experiences, from musings on the language that Clemens used so effectively to consideration of the images and processes of composition, these essays challenge long-held notions of why Clemens was so successful and so influential a writer. While that search itself is not new, the varied approaches within this collection highlight markedly inventive ways of reading the life and work of Samuel Clemens.

Tracks the genesis and evolution of Twain's reputation as a writer, revealing how and why the writer has been under fire since the advent of his career.

Honor Book for the 2005 Book Award given by the Children's Literature Association The popularity of the Harry Potter books among adults and the critical acclaim these young adult fantasies have received may seem like a novel literary phenomenon. In the nineteenth century, however, readers considered both Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn as works of literature equally for children and adults; only later was the former relegated to the category of "boys' books" while the latter, even as it was canonized, came frequently to be regarded as unsuitable for young readers. Adults—women and men—wept over Little Women. And America's most prestigious literary journals regularly reviewed books written for both children and their parents. This egalitarian approach to children's literature changed with the emergence of literary studies as a scholarly discipline at the turn of the twentieth century. Academics considered children's books an inferior literature and beneath serious consideration. In Kiddie Lit, Beverly Lyon Clark explores the marginalization of children's literature in America—and its recent possible reintegration—both within the academy and by the mainstream critical establishment. Tracing the reception of works by Mark Twain, Louisa May Alcott, Lewis Carroll, Frances Hodgson Burnett, L. Frank Baum, Walt Disney, and J. K. Rowling, Clark reveals fundamental shifts in the assessment of the literary worth of books beloved by both children and adults, whether written for boys or girls. While uncovering the institutional underpinnings of this transition, Clark also attributes it to changing American attitudes toward childhood itself, a cultural resistance to the intrinsic value of childhood expressed through sentimentality, condescension, and moralizing. Clark's engaging and enlightening study of the critical disregard for children's books since the end of the nineteenth century—which draws on recent scholarship in gender, cultural, and literary studies— offers provocative new insights into the history of both children's literature and American literature in general, and forcefully argues that the books our children read and love demand greater respect.

Even well-meaning fiction writers of the late Jim Crow era (1900-1955) perpetuated racial stereotypes in their depiction of black characters. From 1918 to 1952, Octavus Roy Cohen turned out a remarkable 360 short stories featuring Florian Slappey and the schemers, romancers and ditzes of Birmingham's Darktown for The Saturday Evening Post and other publications. Cohen said, "I received a great deal of mail from Negroes and I have never found any resentment from a one of them." The black readership had to be satisfied with any black presence in the popular literature of the day. The best known white writers of black characters included Booth Tarkington (Herman and Verman in the Penrod books), Irvin S. Cobb (Judge Priest's houseman Jeff Poindexter), Roark Bradford (Widow Duck, the plantation matriarch), Hugh Wiley (Wildcat Marsden, the war veteran who traveled the country in the company of his goat) and Charles Correll and Freeman Gosden (radio's Amos 'n' Andy). These writers deservedly declined in the civil rights era, but left a curious legacy that deserves examination. This book, focusing on authors of series fiction and particularly of humorous stories, profiles 29 writers and their black characters in detail, with brief entries covering 72 others.

Who was Mark Twain? Was he the genial author of two beloved boys books, the white-haired and white-suited avuncular humorist, the realistic novelist, the exposer of shams, the author repressed by bourgeois values, or the social satirist whose later writings embody an increasingly dark view? In light of those and other conceptions, the question we need to ask is not who he was but how did we get so many Mark Twains? The Mercurial Mark Twains(s): Reception History and Iconic Authorship provides answers to that question by examining the way Twain, his texts, and his image have been constructed by his audiences. Drawing on archival records of responses from common readers, reviewer reactions, analyses by Twain scholars and critics, and film and television adaptations, this study provides the first wide-ranging, fine-grained historical analysis of Twain’s reception in both the public and private spheres, from the 1860s until the end of the twentieth century.