Mark Twain's ‘Rhapsody’: Printing and the Oral Tradition in Huckleberry Finn
- Mark Twain's ‘Rhapsody’: Printing and the Oral Tradition in Huckleberry Finn
Associate Professor of English, University of Manitoba The Immortals (1980); A New-Found Ecstasy (1988)
Notes
1. Mark Twain, ‘The Old-Fashioned Printer,’ in The Complete Works of Mark Twain: Mark Twain's Speeches (New York: Harper and Brothers 1923), 138 and 140.
2. Mark Twain, Mark Twain's Notebook, ed Albert Bigelow Paine (New York and London: Harper 1935), 181, 211, and 235.
3. Mark Twain, Huckleberry Finn, ed Henry Nash Smith (Boston: Riverside 1958), 3 and 245. All subsequent quotations from the novel are from this edition and page numbers are cited parenthetically in the text.
4. DeLancey Ferguson, Mark Twain: Man and Legend (Indianapolis and New York: Bobbs-Merrill 1943), 189–91.
5. Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (London and New York: Methuen 1982), 148 and 149.
6. Ong, 37–45.
7. Walter Blair, ‘When Was Huckleberry Finn Written?’ American Literature, 30(1958), 1–25.
8. Bernard DeVoto, Mark Twain at Work (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press 1942), 66.
9. Ferguson, 213.
10. Ferguson, 152; italics mine.
11. Ong, 73.
12. Ong, 101.
13. William Dean Howells, My Mark Twain (New York and London: Harper and Brothers 1910), 17.
14. David Sewell, ‘We Ain’t Trying to Talk Alike: Varieties of Language in Huckleberry Finn,’ in One Hundred Years of Huckleberry Finn: The Boy, His Book, and American Culture, ed Robert Sattelmeyer and J. Donald Crowley (Columbia: University of Missouri Press 1985), 201.
15. Neil Schmitz, ‘Huckspeech,’ in Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, ed Harold Bloom (New York, New Haven, and Philadelphia: Chelsea House Press 1986), 46: ‘Huck speaks a familiar speech spoken all around us at all times, the speech of the illiterate, the speech of the preliterate, of the poor, and of children.’
16. Henry Nash Smith, Mark Twain: The Development of a Writer (Cambridge, Mass: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press 1962), 4.
17. Ong, 119.
18. Ong, 146.
19. Ong, 81.
20. Daniel G. Hoffman, Form and Fable in American Fiction (New York: Oxford University Press 1961), 333 and 339.
21. Andrew Brown, A New Companion to Greek Tragedy (Totowa, New Jersey: Barnes and Noble 1983), 138.
22. Basil Petrakos, Delphi (Athens: Clio Editions 1977), 11–12.
23. Cf C.M. Kearns, ‘The Limits of Semiotics in Huckleberry Finn,’ in Mark Twain, ed Harold Bloom (New York, New Haven, and Philadelphia: Chelsea House 1986), 211–12, whose interpretation of Jim's tale of having been charmed by witches and ridden to New Orleans and back and even around the world allows us to see how this story, too, can serve as a prophecy of events yet to take place in Jim's life.
24. Ong, 96–7 and 119.
25. Mark Twain's Letters, ed Albert Bigelow Paine, II (New York and London: Harper and Brothers 1917), 504.
26. Ong, 13, 72, and 93.
