Satire or Evasion?

Satire or Evasion?

Black Perspectives on Huckleberry Finn

  • Author: Leonard, James S.; Tenney, Thomas; Davis, Thadious M.; Wallace, John H.
  • Publisher: Duke University Press
  • ISBN: 9780822311638
  • eISBN Pdf: 9780822381716
  • Place of publication:  Durham , United States
  • Year of digital publication: 1991
  • Month: November
  • Pages: 288
  • DDC: 813/.4
  • Language: English
Though one of America’s best known and loved novels, Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn has often been the object of fierce controversy because of its racist language and reliance on racial stereotypes. This collection of fifteen essays by prominent African American scholars and critics examines the novel’s racist elements and assesses the degree to which Twain’s ironies succeed or fail to turn those elements into a satirical attack on racism.
Ranging from the laudatory to the openly hostile, these essays include personal impressions of Huckleberry Finn, descriptions of classroom experience with the book, evaluations of its ironic and allegorical aspects, explorations of its nineteenth-century context, and appraisal of its effects on twentieth-century African American writers. Among the issues the authors contend with are Twain’s pervasive use of the word “nigger,” his portrayal of the slave Jim according to the conventions of the minstrel show “darky,” and the thematic chaos created by the “evasion” depicted in the novel’s final chapters.
Sure to provoke thought and stir debate, Satire or Evasion? provides a variety of new perspectives on one of this country’s most troubling classics.

Contributors. Richard K. Barksdale, Bernard W. Bell, Mary Kemp Davis, Peaches M. Henry, Betty Harris Jones, Rhett S. Jones, Julius Lester, Donnarae MacCann, Charles H. Nichols, Charles H. Nilon, Arnold Rampersad, David L. Smith, Carmen Dubryan, John H. Wallace, Kenny Jackson Williams, Fredrick Woodard

  • Contents
  • Acknowledgments
  • Introduction: The Controversy over Huckleberry Finn
  • Huck Finn and the Authorities
    • The Case Against Huck Finn
    • The Struggle for Tolerance: Race and Censorship in Huckleberry Finn
    • History, Slavery, and Thematic Irony in Huckleberry Finn
  • Jim and Huck in the Nineteenth Century
    • The Ending of Huckleberry Finn: “Freeing the Free Negro”
    • The Veil Rent in Twain: Degradation and Revelation in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
    • Mark Twain and the Black Challenge
    • Huck, Jim, and American Racial Discourse
  • Blackface and White Inside
    • Twain’s “Nigger” Jim: The Tragic Face behind the Minstrel Mask
    • Minstrel Shackles and Nineteenth-Century “Liberality” in Huckleberry Finn
    • Huck and Jim: A Reconsideration
    • Nigger and Knowledge: White Double-Consciousness in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
  • Huck Finn in the Twentieth Century
    • Morality and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
    • “A True Book—With Some Stretchers”: Huck Finn Today
    • Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Afro-American Literature
    • Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; or, Mark Twain's Racial Ambiguity
  • For Further Reading
  • Contributors
  • Index

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