Product Description

Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is, according to many critics and fond readers, the great American novel. Full of vibrant American characters, intriguing regional dialects and folkways, and down-home good humor, it also hits Americans in one of their greatest and on-going sore spots: the fraught issue of racism. As Huck and Jim float down the Mississippi and encounter all manner of people and situations, and as Huck struggles mightily with his conscience concerning Jim, the novel strongly invites a moral and religious perspective. In this new edition, Mary R. Reichardt's introduction places the book in its historical and biographical context, and several critical articles examine such issues as the book's moral implications, religious contexts, and status as an American epic. Mary R. Reichardt, the editor of this edition, is a professor of literature in the Catholic Studies department at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul MN.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #304004 in Books
• Published on: 2009-04-30
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 424 pages

Customer Reviews

Great new edition of a great book
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn truly deserves its reputation as one of the greatest American novels. It's a deep and complex work; despite its humor and entertainment value, Twain wanted to comment on various aspects of human nature and society. (Not "slavery is bad," as they tend to harp on in high schools today. Slavery was long gone by the time this was written.) Unlike Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn is NOT a children's book, but was written for adults; many people seem to have forgotten this, and are then disappointed when their kids don't take to it.

This Ignatius critical edition does a good job of helping readers get much more out of the book than they might otherwise. The essays especially focus on some less-obvious dimensions of the book's moral content. Unlike some critical editions, the essays here are not mired in academic gobbledygook but are easy for casual readers, high-school students, and undergraduates to read and understand.

FATALLY TAINTED BY THE POOR COMPANY IT KEEPS, GO FOR THE RANDOM HOUSE INSTEAD
This entire Ignatius Critical Series presented by the nonacademic "writer in residence" Joe Pearce has been previously closely examined and discovered seriously lacking in its academic methodology and its claim to some slick "traditional" interpretation surpassing even the Norton, Arden and Oxford, by God! Kindly see the reviews with citations under other volumes in this most unfortunate hack series.

Therefore we look with great caution approaching repulsion at the list of slightly published (mainly in their own in-house pamphlets) reputed academes doing the critical singing here. As in the other ICS publications, they are mainly housed at tiny Catholic colleges of the bitter while wealthy Legionnaires flavor, and except for Father Berret, have nothing published outside their own walls.

Mr. Byrne's field of expertise for instance appears a rather polemical positioning on government and politics of the Archbishop Burke stripe. In fact he favors Edmund Burke. We find another little known professor holed up in a small Catholic college in Greenville, South Carolina, and another in Saint Paul. Stanford is at a place called Christendom College in Virginia while the ubiquitous to this severely debilitated series Ass. Prof. Urbanczyk hides out at Southern Catholic College, near neighbor no doubt to the writer in residence Pearce himself, writing the occassional book report for an unknown revue called Modern Age.

While it seems that Pearce bestirred himself enough to find, with at least the one glaringly startingly exception, more relevant scholars for hire (under the brave motto publish or perish) here than in his other efforts in this limp line of dubious wares (we recall with horror the architectural history student analyzing Hamlet) by the inclusion of Father Berret, we must note in Father Berret's article he himself recommends the most recent Random House edition, which includes selections from the newly discovered manuscript.

We must therefore do little less in this present Annus Sacerdotalis than to follow Father Berret's learned indications and travel to Random House, giving wide and deserved berth to this Ignatius Critical Series in each of its horrific manifestations. Those unable to locate this Random House offering do best to proceed (or to augment) with the most authoritative and academic Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Norton Critical Editions). Do your students a large favor, and go for this objective and scholarly presentation of this important American text; avoid the twisted, blindered, severely compromised ICS at all times.