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Manipulating a Genre: "Huckleberry Finn" as Boy Book

1988; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 5; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2307/3189046

1549-3377

Alan Gribben,

American Sports and Literature

Scholars routinely classify Mark Twain's The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) among the designated Books of nineteenth-century American literature, that series of works extolling American boyhood which burst forth in emulation of Thomas Bailey Aldrich's The Story of a Boy (1869). However, Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885) is much less frequently assigned to this category, at least in part because Huckleberry Finn seems so manifestly superior to any label. For that matter, it might be observed that the American Boy Book itself is one of the most casually accepted notions in literary history and criticism. The curious assortment of what we loosely define as Books (or sometimes Bad Boy Books) embraces an amazingly heterogeneous collection of writings-sentimental autobiography, juvenile romance, quasi-sociological documentary, comic slapstick, literary burlesque-that mainly have in common a reverence for boyhood, an autobiographical flavor, a setting in the past, and a code of behavior alien to most adults.