In my final research project for a course centering on Mark Twain, I analyze Huckleberry Finn in conjunction with Percival Everett’s novel James. In doing so, I engage the history of Huckleberry Finn’s critical and popular reception, in order to contextualize how audiences have understood and respond to the novel. This helps prime my discussion of James to analyze how it fits into the larger discussion of criticism surrounding Huck Finn. Within this section of the essay, I quote Jonathan Arac, who helps contextualize the history of Huckleberry Finn’s reception. I draw on Robert Parker’s explanation of new historicism, a mode of thought that aims to “try to restore literature to its social history while retaining the tools of deconstruction and post structuralism that can help us see social history in its multifarious intricacy” (272).
I write, “Huckleberry Finn has long been the talk of literary critics, writers, and the public at large. Arac asserts that widespread use of Huckleberry Finn in educational settings as well as serious criticism surrounding the novel began in the 1940’s. Prior to then, Arac states, ‘for the culture at large it was a beloved boy’s book’ (6), and held cultural sway less for its own merits than for Twain’s larger than life celebrity status. Arac notes that, ‘in the 1920’s the leading critic of his generation, Edmund Wilson, observed of Twain that ‘the man was more impressive than his work’’ (5). This changed in the decades following World War II, when ‘Huckleberry Finn became a universally assigned college text and the focus of a huge amount of academic scholarship and critical discussion’” (Arac 6).
By including Arac as a critical voice, I try to help establish the many lenses Huck Finn has been viewed through over time and situate it within a complex and changing cultural discourse.
I draw on Joseph Williams and Joseph Bizup’s Style: Lessons in Clarity and Grace by both dropping in and weaving in my quotations. My last sentence, “This changed in the decades following World War II, when ‘Huckleberry Finn became a universally assigned college text and the focus of a huge amount of academic scholarship and critical discussion’” (Arac 6) does the best job of this, avoiding an introductory verb in favor of more fully integrating it into my sentence, a move that Williams and Bizup describe as “a more graceful way to use a quotation” (234). In doing so, I engage in Eric Hayot’s idea that by integrating quoted material into my own sentences, I diminish or mitigate the force of the quote, emphasizing its role as background within my paper rather than a central idea within my thesis (Hayot 154-155).
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