HF+Introduction

     INTRODUCTION: So, you just finished studying Mark Twain's //The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn//, well brace yourself because your in for a wild ride!! Get ready to raft through a river of information as you enter the world of Mark Twain and his story of two friends Huckleberry Finn and Miss Watson's Jim.

Since its publication in 1884 critics have been attacking Mr. Twain’s choice of words in his novel, //The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,// with harsh debates regarding its banishment. In 1884 Massachusetts’ Concord Public Library barred the book explaining that the masterpiece “… is flippant and irreverent in its style. It deals with a series of experiences that are certainly not elevating. The whole book is of a class that is more profitable for the slum than it is for respectable people. And it is trash of the veriest sort”.

Today, over 100 years later, this position is still held by critics all over our country; the dispute that is usually headed by parents, students, and even teachers throughout the American public education system have argued so much that //The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn// has been on the Top Five List of most frequently banned books for years. Today's debate over the book's qualities, however, mostly stem from Twain's “racist attitudes" depicted in the characters, and even more troubling a heated debate has been brewing trying to determine the book’s place in the canon of Classic American Literature.

There are many debates going on out there about the book's value in the classroom; however, the one that we want to pay attention to today is the ever-so- heated racism debate. Gerald Graff and James Phelan of “A Case Study in Critical Controversy: //Adventures of Huckleberry Finn//" state the racial problems surrounding the classic quite clearly: on one hand it is argued that “the novel is the ultimate expression of the American domestic spirit, a book that seriously criticizes slavery and racism and celebrates Huck’s recognition of Jim’s individuality and worth” (357) but on the other hand, “many readers argue that the novel is so fundamentally and unforgivably racist that promoting it as a masterpiece of American literature actually perpetuates the country’s racism” (356).

In order to participate in this scholarly debate you must first understand it. You are going to start your task by taking on the role of a Twain scholar and research the already existing literature surrounding these arguments. You will then take a position based on your own opinions as well as your findings and communicate them in a scholarly paper.

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