{"product_id":"was-huck-black-mark-twain-and-africanamerican-voices-oxford-paperbacks-9780195089141","title":"Was Huck Black?: Mark Twain and African-American Voices (Oxford Paperbacks)","description":"\u003cp\u003ePublished in 1884  Huck Finn has become one of the most widely taught novels in American curricula. But where did Huckleberry Finn come from  and what made it so distinctive? Shelley Fisher Fishkin suggests that in Huckleberry Finn  more than in any other work  Mark Twain let African-American voices  language  and rhetorical traditions play a major role in the creation of his art. In Was Huck Black?  Fishkin combines close readings of published and unpublished writing by Twain with intensive biographical and historical research and insights gleaned from linguistics  literary theory  and folklore to shed new light on the role African-American speech played in the genesis of Huckleberry Finn. Given that books importance in American culture  her analysis illuminates  as well  how the voices of African-Americans have shaped our sense of what is distinctively \"American\" about American literature. Fishkin shows that Mark Twain was surrounded  throughout his life  by richly talented African-American speakers whose rhetorical gifts Twain admired candidly and profusely. A black child named Jimmy whom Twain called \"the most artless  sociable and exhaustless talker I ever came across\" helped Twain understand the potential of a vernacular narrator in the years before he began writing Huckleberry Finn  and served as a model for the voice with which Twain would transform American literature. A slave named Jerry whom Twain referred to as an \"impudent and satirical and delightful young black man\" taught Twain about \"signifying\"--satire in an African-American vein--when Twain was a teenager (later Twain would recall that he thought him \"the greatest man in the United States\" at the time). Other African-American voices left their mark on Twains imagination as well--but their role in the creation of his art has never been recognized. Was Huck Black? adds a new dimension to current debates over multiculturalism and the canon. American literary historians have told a largely segregated story: white writers come from white literary ancestors  black writers from black ones. The truth is more complicated and more interesting. While African-American culture shaped Huckleberry Finn  that novel  in turn  helped shape African-American writing in the twentieth century. As Ralph Ellison commented in an interview with Fishkin  Twain \"made it possible for many of us to find our own voices.\" Was Huck Black? dramatizes the crucial role of black voices in Twains art  and takes the first steps beyond traditional cultural boundaries to unveil an American literary heritage that is infinitely richer and more complex than we had thought.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"My Store","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":45646959444021,"sku":"ByrdShop_0195089146","price":25.33,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0627\/8139\/0901\/files\/9780195089141.jpg?v=1781683398","url":"https:\/\/atxbooks.com\/products\/was-huck-black-mark-twain-and-africanamerican-voices-oxford-paperbacks-9780195089141","provider":"ATX Books","version":"1.0","type":"link"}