Social Play and Bad Faith in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
1984; University of California Press; Volume: 39; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.2307/3044819
ISSN2324-6405
Autores Tópico(s)American Sports and Literature
ResumoUGH it is generally granted a place among Mark Twain's major works, Tom Sawyer has not attracted critical attention commensurate with its high canonical station. Indeed, it is not unusual to find professional students of American history and literature who admit that they have not gone back to Tom Sawyer since they first read it-or since it was first read to them-as children. Such benign neglect is not altogether surprising. Though they should know better, many readers have been influenced by Mark Twain's caveat that his is intended mainly for entertainment of boys and girls.' Undoubtedly, many others have acquiesced in view, advanced for decades in survey courses around country, that despite its interest as a formal departure, and its chronological significance as Mark Twain's first sustained meditation on the matter of Hannibal, Tom Sawyer is nonetheless a mere foretaste of greater things to come. For some, book is read as an adjunct to Huckleberry Finn; and such readers are perhaps understandably predisposed to regard Tom as a conventional, rather mindless proto-entrepreneur. For most part, however, Tom Sawyer has been widely accepted as a minor juvenile classic-the supreme American idyll, in Bernard DeVoto's familiar characterization.2
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