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Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Bloom's Modern Critical Interpretations) PDF

257 Pages·2007·1.24 MB·English
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Preview Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Bloom's Modern Critical Interpretations)

Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretations Alice’s Adventures in Frankenstein Persuasion Wonderland The Grapes of Wrath Portnoy’s Complaint The Adventures of Great Expectations A Portrait of the Artist Huckleberry Finn The Great Gatsby as a Young Man All Quiet on the Hamlet Pride and Prejudice Western Front The Handmaid’s Tale Ragtime As You Like It Heart of Darkness The Red Badge of The Ballad of the Sad I Know Why the Courage Café Caged Bird Sings The Rime of the Beloved The Iliad Ancient Mariner Beowulf Jane Eyre The Rubáiyát of Omar Billy Budd, Benito The Joy Luck Club Khayyám Cereno, Bartleby the The Jungle The Scarlet Letter Scrivener, and Other Long Day’s Journey A Separate Peace Tales Into Night Silas Marner Black Boy Lord of the Flies Song of Myself The Bluest Eye The Lord of the Rings Song of Solomon Cat on a Hot Tin Love in the Time of The Stranger Roof Cholera A Streetcar Named The Catcher in the Macbeth Desire Rye The Man Without Sula Catch-22 Qualities The Sun Also Rises Cat’s Cradle The Metamorphosis The Tale of Genji The Color Purple Miss Lonelyhearts A Tale of Two Cities Crime and Moby-Dick The Tales of Poe Punishment Night The Tempest The Crucible 1984 Their Eyes Were Darkness at Noon The Odyssey Watching God Death of a Salesman Oedipus Rex Things Fall Apart The Death of Artemio The Old Man and the To Kill a Mockingbird Cruz Sea Ulysses The Divine Comedy On the Road Waiting for Godot Don Quixote One Flew Over the The Waste Land Dubliners Cuckoo’s Nest White Noise Emerson’s Essays One Hundred Years of Wuthering Heights Emma Solitude Young Goodman Fahrenheit 451 The Pardoner’s Tale Brown Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretations Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn Updated Edition Edited and with an introduction by Harold Bloom Sterling Professor of the Humanities Yale University Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretations: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn— Updated Edition Copyright ©2007 Infobase Publishing Introduction © 2007 by Harold Bloom All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher. For more information contact: Bloom’s Literary Criticism An imprint of Infobase Publishing 132 West 31st Street New York NY 10001 ISBN-10: 0-7910-9426-X ISBN-13: 978-0-7910-9426-6 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Mark Twain’s The adventures of Huckleberry Finn / Harold Bloom, editor. — Updated ed. p. cm. — (Bloom’s modern critical interpretations) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-7910-9426-X (hardcover) 1. Twain, Mark, 1835–1910. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. 2. Finn, Huckleberry (Fictitious character) 3. Mississippi River—In literature. 4. Boys in literature. 5. Race relations in literature. I. Bloom, Harold. II. Title. III. Series. PS1305.M28 2007 813’.4—dc22 2006036858 Bloom’s Literary Criticism books are available at special discounts when purchased in bulk quantities for businesses, associations, institutions, or sales promotions. Please call our Special Sales Department in New York at (212) 967-8800 or (800) 322-8755. You can find Bloom’s Literary Criticism on the World Wide Web at http://www.chelseahouse.com Contributing Editor: Pamela Loos Cover designed by Ben Peterson Cover image: Dover Publications Printed in the United States of America Bang EJB 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 This book is printed on acid-free paper. All links and web addresses were checked and verified to be correct at the time of pub- lication. Because of the dynamic nature of the web, some addresses and links may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. Contents Editor’s Note vii Introduction 1 Harold Bloom The Realism of Huckleberry Finn 7 Tom Quirk Life Without Father: The Role of the Paternal in the Opening Chapters of Huckleberry Finn 27 Harry G. Segal Huck and Jim on the Mississippi: Going with the Flow? 43 Carl F. Wieck Huck, Jim, and the “Black-and-White” Fallacy 55 James S. Leonard Huckleberry Finn and the Problem of Freedom 67 Sanford Pinsker Deadpan Huck: Or, What’s Funny about Interpretation 75 Sacvan Bercovitch Who Shot Tom Sawyer? 119 Jeffrey Steinbrink vi Contents Huckleberry Finn and Twain’s Democratic Art of Writing 129 Mary P. Nichols The “Raftsmen’s Passage,” Huck’s Crisis of Whiteness, and Huckleberry Finn in U.S. Literary History 149 Peter Schmidt Reinventing the World and Reinventing the Self in Huck Finn 171 Bennett Kravitz “That Night We Had Our Show”: Twain and Audience 193 Todd Giles Floating Capital: The Trouble with Whiteness on Twain’s Mississippi 203 Stephanie Le Menager Chronology 229 Contributors 233 Bibliography 237 Acknowledgments 241 Index 243 Editor’s Note My Introduction celebrates Huck Finn as the greatest American image of the storyteller’s freedom—from time and from fact. The plotlessness of Huckleberry Finn is studied by Tom Quirk, after which Harry G. Segal examines the scary figure of Pap Finn, and Carl F. Wieck gives a fresh perspective upon the Mississippi’s importance in the novel. The Huck-Jim relationship is seen by James S. Leonard in terms of Twain’s shrewd manipulation of inarticulateness and illogic to create a highly articulate narrative and clear thematic logic. Sanford Pinsker persuasively argues that Twain’s greatest novel is profoundly subversive because it is truly anti-racist and thus tells us truth about ourselves. The distinguished historicist Sacvan Bercovitch paradoxically suggests that Huckleberry Finn’s humor “lies in its denial of comic relief,” while Jeffrey Steinbrink wryly demonstrates an accurate distaste for Tom Sawyer, Huck’s too-respectable sidekick. Twain’s democratic ethos of writing is found to be incarnated in Huck-as-narrator by Mary P. Nichols, after which Peter Schmidt traces the influence of “Huck’s crisis of whiteness” upon subsequent critics and historians of American literature. The Huck-Jim relationship is freshly elucidated by Bennet Kravitz, while Todd Giles finds a dramatic component in the novel. Stephanie Le Menager concludes this volume with a mordant essay on Twain’s deep awareness that his American West was just as much founded upon “international piracy and slavery” as was the American South. vii HAROLD BLOOM Introduction I After supper she got out her book and learned me about Moses and the Bulrushers, and I was in a sweat to find out all about him; but by-and-by she let it out that Moses had been dead a considerable long time; so then I didn’t care no more about him; because I don’t take stock in dead people. Huck Finn’s American vision has this in common with Captain Ahab’s or Walt Whitman’s, that Huck too would strike the sun if it insulted him. The three best American books—Huckleberry Finn, Moby-Dick, Leaves of Grass—have in common also that they are each the most American of books. Twain’s masterpiece is essentially comic, Melville’s is tragic, Whitman’s is beyond characterization or categorization, except that despite its humor and its Emersonian hopes for America, we remember it best for its dark shadows. Huckleberry Finn, shrewd and grim as it is sometimes compelled to be, remains unique in our national literature for its affirmative force. Fecund in its progeny—as diverse as Kipling’s Kim, Eliot’s The Dry Salvages, Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, and Mailer’s Why Are We in Vietnam?—the book is likely to go on engendering our strongest writers, with only Leaves of Grass as a rival in that role. 1

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