Search Results

The book Huckleberry Finn was written to challenge dominant common places of American literary study and education. This deals with the development of the book's perspectives for an international interdisciplinary discussion concerning the relationships between “cultural property” and “national and ethnic identity.” Writing for an interdisciplinary and global audience makes the author want to be certain that we hold in common a few fundamental facts about Huckleberry Finn as a cultural object in the United States. This part also answers the question why did Huckleberry Finn become the most widely taught American book, in schools at all levels despite the fact that not all cultural authorities participate in hyper canonization or idolatry.

This chapter explores Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, the most celebrated novel of the late nineteenth century, as the most completely realized example of the perspectival realism of the Reconstruction generation. Addressing Twain’s relationship with Howells and considering the way Twain’s absorption of the categories of the “sentimental fool” and the practices of mugwump aestheticism fed into his approach as a novelist, this chapter reads Huckleberry Finn as an allegory of the irreducible complexity of emancipation. This reading overturns traditional readings of the novel that celebrate Huck’s raft as a space of utopian freedom. It also offers an alternative to the dilemmas encountered by readers who have confronted the novel’s minstrelized depiction of the escaped slave Jim. What Twain called his “double-barreled” novel must be read for the way the possibilities of emancipation are hidden in plain sight, obscured by symbols of freedom such as the raft. Written in an age of renewed federalism even as it looks back at the antebellum world, Huckleberry Finn invites the reader to consider the possibility that the multiplicity of jurisdictions and overlapping, nonunified character of the U.S. legal system might represent a route toward emancipation in a world in which, absent a uniform law, no community could represent true justice.

The chapter makes a final tribute to the patriotism and bravery that Mark Twain exhibited in his works, particularly in the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn where he dared to defy the prevailing views of European superiority and American mediocrity. He was a hero to the various readers whom he helped free from the strictures of Victorian sensibility to step bravely into the modern age. He was a maverick who turned his back on conventional literary rules and managed to create a unique style that gracefully captured ordinary, even crude, vernacular speech to produce numerous literary masterpieces. Finally, he was a socio-political reformist who took it upon himself to fight the pervading social iniquities of his time with his words. Indeed, the echoes of his vibrant consciousness, immortalized in his work and deeply embedded in the warp and weave of American culture, is expected to reverberate for generations to come.

This chapter considers competing understandings of male same-sex relations in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885) and analyzes how Mark Twain employs typical plot elements and motifs from romantic friendship fiction in tandem with more recent and competing, pseudoscientific discourses on the homeless man. Huckleberry Finn contains the materials for a wide-ranging analysis of the different and competing understandings of nineteenth-century American manhood and the ways in which men might interact with and love each other. In order to better understand the sexual and emotional dynamics of the novel, one must understand the other kinds of writings about men alone. The chapter places Twain's classic novel in two nineteenth-century discursive contexts that have been obscured in the existing criticism: the fiction of romantic friendship and the public debate on the homeless man. Huckleberry Finn may be seen as the reverse of the medal of normative, middle-class masculinity in Victorian America and as a counterpoint to the more conventional, idealized accounts of romantic friendship in the works of several of Twain's contemporaries and rivals.

The fluidity of identity in democratic America is a central theme in Huckleberry Finn and reveals how the bright side of the American dream is connected to the dark. Released from the shackles of aristocracy in Europe, Americans are free to become the best that they can be and to rise in social and economic position. But a fresh start may easily become a false start, and the freedom to reinvent oneself is also a license to imposture. Thus a novel that celebrates democratic freedom also chronicles the ways that freedom can be abused. In the misadventures of the charlatan king and duke, Twain identifies a problem in the new democracy—its need to find new forms of nobility and thus its nostalgia for the old European aristocratic poses.

Chapter 2 examines Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885) in terms of the changing economic structure of Twain's time. Twain's realist novel is framed by episodes that feature Tom Sawyer as the casuistic leader of a gang and the mastermind of intricate plots. Tom is a parody of the manager of Twain's age, personifying a culture so deeply embedded in system management that it has lost the moral sense. In a culture without moral sense, sentimentality is fraudulent, and manipulation, as the Duke and the King prove, is easy. Huck and Jim, in the center of the text, develop a sensibility that is deeply sentimental. For the runaway orphan and the escaped slave, the sentimental touch is not a sham, but is a restoration of the moral sense and a vindication of sentimentalism. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn warns against the emotional excess of sentimental literature, but the text endorses sentimental values.

This chapter studies the characters of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn in Mark Twain's The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885). Twain used Tom Sawyer to celebrate American democracy in its centennial year, but nine years later, he used Huckleberry Finn to lament the countries' self-betrayal through racial and cultural slavery. Despite the books' reputations as exuberant declarations of independence, both Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn are more about confinement and enclosure than freedom. Twain imagines freedom in these books more as a resistance to various kinds of imprisonment than as a state of being to be explored and affirmed in itself.

Mark Twain naturalizes Huckleberry, as part of the American frontier landscape taken in and uttered by an uneducated youth, the techniques of impressionist prose so important in so much ambitious Western writing from Flaubert to Conrad and beyond. The privilege of sensitive spectatorship is extended from the leisure class down the social scale, bringing to fulfillment an experiment that in the early nineteenth-century British poetry of William Wordsworth had met a far more mixed response. Huck is not wholly formed by his culture, yet he is shown to believe in the social customs governing slavery, even though he breaks them in allying himself with Jim, and at several points quite specifically acting to protect Jim. Readers applaud his actions and laugh indulgently at his self-doubts and self-castigations. In its time, Huckleberry Finn was understood as realistic for its evident refusal to idealize.

This chapter explores the socio-historical and political background in China into which Twain was first introduced. Brought to Chinese readers by Liang Qichao during his exile in Japan in late Qing China, Twain’s work indispensably contributed to the early process of transnationalism in the Chinese literary community across China, Japan, and the US. Huckleberry Finn, in particular, was used to revolutionize literature, language, and society in China as the nation was undergoing a series of westernization reforms and as a political tool during the Cold War era. Nevertheless, the travels of Huck Finn from the Chinese Mainland to Hong Kong and Taiwan during the Chinese Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) suggests that translating Twain’s work in these places functioned in part as a means of distancing themselves from communism and Chinese civilization as it was being constructed in the Mainland at the time.

This chapter examines specific passages from Huck Finn and explores how Chinese translators approach Twain's work in the late 20th century and beyond—how they conveyed appropriate contexts and elucidated elements that were unfamiliar to Chinese readers. Drawing on a few representative works of translation from different periods, the chapter explores some of the challenges that Chinese translators have been confronted with when it comes to translating the language of a fourteen-year-old boy, Pap Finn’s racist attitude, and Jim’s black vernacular. It looks at how Twain's work was used to portray America in different spatial and historical moments, as well as how American race relations get transposed into other cultural contexts, and whether the critiques of racism embodied in Twain's work get passed on to readers in China.

This chapter offers a reading of Mark Twain's novel Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. It explains that the character of Huck is tainted by the deformed conscience throughout the book, though not as continuously as Tom, who exemplifies it. It describes a reading of Twain as anthropological rather than moral, political, or social and suggests that there is better reason for reading the novel as pastoral.

This chapter examines the legal and cultural connections between vagrancy and racialization by focusing on the ways in which the relative immobilization of Chinese, Native American, and black bodies underwrote the romanticized white vagabondage at the heart of Mark Twain's novel Huckleberry Finn and its intertexts. Through closed readings of Huckleberry Finn and Bret Harte's “Three Vagabonds of Trinidad,” the chapter highlights the disproportionate use of vagrancy laws to criminalize Native American, Mexican, black, and Chinese subjects. More specifically, it reads Huckleberry Finn's white vagabonds alongside legal, popular, and literary treatments of racialized mobility in the postbellum South and West. It concludes by analyzing the aftermaths of Chinese purges and Indian massacres dramatized in “Three Vagabonds of Trinidad.”

This chapter offers a reading of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, a novel by Mark Twain that was first published in Britain in 1884 and the United States in 1885. It examines the prestige of Huckleberry Finn in American culture and its place within mass consumption. In order to understand Huckleberry Finn's special power, the chapter analyzes Twain's success in placing the novel within a structure of national nostalgic self-conception. It also considers Huckleberry Finn's mocking of cultural institutions such as the Christianity of Sunday school, the language of grammar school, the funereal poetry of genteel society, and the excitements of romance fiction.

This chapter reviews the literary works of Mark Twain, another refugee from the former Confederacy who settled for a time in Hartford, Connecticut. Twain both accepted and loathed this state of affairs as a condition of his renown, and he turned it into a central theme of his fictions. The best of them—Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885) and Pudd'nhead Wilson (1894)—dwell obsessively on the risk of verbal indiscretion and the fear of being found out. These novels contain some of the most famous black characters in American literature—Jim, Roxy, and Tom Driscoll—and the two books are widely studied for their insight into the problem of race after Reconstruction.

This essay limns what American Studies scholars lose by ignoring work published outside the US or published in languages other than English. It then explores two current examples of transnational, interdisciplinary, collaborative research that cross national, disciplinary, linguistic and cultural borders. “Global Huck: A Digital Palimpsest Mapping Project, or Deep Map (DPMP)” centers on the question of how literature travels globally, taking the travels of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn as the subject of its study. The essay outlines insights to be gained from looking at the novel’s travels in China, France, Germany, Japan, Mexico, and Portugal. The Chinese Railroad Workers in North America Project at Stanford focuses on the Chinese workers who built America’s first transcontinental railroad. It brings together work by scholars in history, literature, anthropology, American Studies and archaeology in the US and Asia to generate insights into a venture that shaped the world on both sides of the Pacific. Both ventures would not have been possible before the era of digitization.

In the final chapter of Huckleberry Finn, Huck concluded that he “got to light out for the territory ahead of the rest, because Aunt Sally she’s going to adopt me and sivilize me, and I can’t stand it. I been there before.” While Huck’s refusal to be “sivilized” speaks of Twain’s own skepticism about white Americans’ construction of the term, the epilogue will present a somewhat different picture of what “sivilization” means when Huck Finn is put into different Chinese contexts, i.e. Mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Xinjiang, Inner Mongolia, and Tibet. It concludes with an overview of the history and nature of Chinese culture and the frontier, and how it thereby influences the understanding of Huck Finn in China. It suggests that, however ironic, the brilliance and lasting popularity of Twain’s work lies in it being effectively used to suit different political implications in politically-conflicting regions.