Mark Twain: Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn: Essays, Articles, Reviews Paperback - 1999

From the rear cover

At last available in a single volume: comprehensive overviews and concise analyses of the key critical texts and approaches to the most-studied works of literature. By assembling extracts from essays, reviews, and articles, the columbia critical guides provide students with ready access to the most important secondary writings on a single text or pair of texts by a given writer.

each volume:

-- Offers a balanced and nuanced approach to criticism, drawing on a wide array of British and American sources -- Explains criticism in terms of key approaches, allowing students the grasp the central issues for each work -- Is edited by a noted scholar who specializes in the writer or work in question -- Includes a complete bibliography, notes, and index.

Mark Twain presented for the first time the vernacular of the Mississippi River region, explored the myths and fables of the nation's past, and looked to the choices facing a rapidly changing society. Moving from a discussion of the two novels' early receptions, this guide explores nineteenth- and twentieth-century criticism by William Dean Howells, T. S. Eliot, Leslie Fiedler, Ralph Ellison, Norman Mailer, and Toni Morrison. The final section provides students with important material on the contemporary debates about race and gender in these novels.