Critical Insights: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn ed. by R. Kent Rasmussen (review)

Every generation some academic publisher decides to take the pulse of American literature to reconfirm the fact that Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn holds the premiere spot as the ultimate American classic. The last major collection of original essays on Huckleberry Finn, titled Satire or Evasion? edited by James S. Leonard, Thomas A. Tenney, and Thadious M. Davis, was published in 1992. Now, over twenty-five years later, with R. Kent Rasmussen as editor and a stellar array of Mark Twain scholars as contributors, Salem Press offers a fresh set of viewpoints in Critical Insights: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

Rasmussen was the ideal choice as editor for this volume. He previously edited Critical Insights: Mark Twain for Salem Press in 2011 and wrote the introduction and notes for a new edition of the Penguin Classics Huckleberry Finn in 2014. His technical skills as an editor and writer, along with his credentials as one of the most knowledgeable Mark Twain scholars in the world today, remain unquestioned. He introduces the volume with the explanation that the measure of greatness of a literary work is the variety and depth of new scholarship it inspires. Rasmussen’s own opening essay is a biography of Samuel Clemens and his legacy. He explains that the true measure of a book’s literary greatness lies in the matter of “interpretability” and the fact that the book has something fresh to say to each new generation.

As proof of Rasmussen’s theory of “interpretability,” thirteen essays from leading scholars are featured. Four essays are devoted to “Critical Contexts,” which provide historical snapshots of the book’s place in American culture. Nine essays are featured in “Critical Readings” and are proof that there is still limitless “interpretability” in this American classic.

Two scholars who have spent their professional lives on the front lines of Mark Twain research contributed to the “Critical Contexts” section. Vic Fischer, veteran editor at the Mark Twain Project, discusses Huckleberry Finn’s journey from Mark Twain’s notes, letters, and manuscripts to printed editions. Along the way the mysteries of determining the author’s intent amid unending errors and variants in typescripts had to be resolved. In his essay titled “‘Bessie’ or ‘Becky’: Should We Care about Text?” Fischer explains how each edition, including those printed during Mark Twain’s lifetime, diverged further and further from the intended text and concludes that it is clearly best to choose an edition to read or teach that features the text the author intended.

Almost as an ironic counterpoint to Fischer’s essay is one by Alan Gribben, who recounts his personal ordeal with editing the NewSouth editions of Huckleberry Finn and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer in 2011. In “Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer Expelled: Censorship and the Classroom” Gribben states that his decision to substitute the word “slave” for “nigger” in the NewSouth edition “went against my doctoral education at the University of California at Berkeley as well as my training in scholarly publishing at the Mark Twain Project” (68), where he had been employed for eight years. Gribben recounts how he never comprehended the full impact of a “stamp of permanent, inescapable inferiority” (67) the word conveyed to his students until he took over a departmental headship in Montgomery, Alabama, a city known as the birthplace of the civil rights movement. Gribben’s goal was to provide an option that would return the book to the classroom with the approval of teachers, parents, and school boards who wanted to avoid controversy. News of Gribben’s decision to edit a sanitized edition of Huckleberry Finn ignited a firestorm of protests, publicity, hate mail, and misconceptions worldwide, with both liberal and conservative commentators aligned against him. However, by 2015 the controversy and misunderstandings had subsided and Gribben was awarded an Excellence Through Diversity Award by his university. The only thing lacking in Gribben’s essay is a footnote telling how effective...