Literary Status Research Articles

The books that lived: J.K. Rowling and the magic of storytelling

This essay addresses the question of “what makes a bestseller?” It seeks to come to a better understanding of the various factors that contribute significantly to the outstanding popular appeal and commercial success of bestsellers, using J.K. Rowling’s fiction as a case study. The reception of her work in quality media allows an exploration of Rowling’s phenomenal success with the Harry Potter series, and invites a comparison with the success of her next two novels, The Casual Vacancy (2012) and The Cuckoo’s Calling (2013), both written for adult readers. The context that the essay draws on is provided by literary theories about bestsellers and their features, rather than the commercial/marketing context of the bestseller. Also commenting on the influence of reviews on bestselling success, and the contested literary status of bestsellers, the essay hopes to shed some light on what constitutes “the magic of storytelling” in bestseller success.

Hybridities in a Metropolitan Diasporic Space – Weng Nao’s Literary Tokyo

This paper explores a hybrid space of Tokyo in the early twentieth century in the literary world of Taiwanese writer Weng Nao. Homi Bhabha’s theory will be adapted in order to further discuss hybridities and ambivalence in the metropolitan space within diasporic literature. Amongst other Taiwanese writers in the 1930s, Weng Nao was one of the few followers of Shin-kankakuha (the Neosensualist School), which was established by Japanese modernist writers such as Kawabata Yasunari, Tanizaki Jun’ichiro, Yokomitsu Riichi, Hayashi Fumiko and Sato Waruo, and insisted on presenting literary writing in the form of pure aesthetics. His new and modernist experimental techniques of literary representation and sophisticated descriptions of the loneliness of urban life and the inner desires of the human mind made his works distinct from those of other Taiwanese diasporic authors in the 1930s. However, with regard to his specific writing style and his detailed descriptions of innermost sexual desires, Weng’s works were far beyond what was deemed acceptable by East Asian or Taiwanese literary communities in the early twentieth century and received quite a significant amount of negative criticism. In addition, being long considered to be mocking the writing style of the Japanese Neosensualist School, Chinese critics such as Gu Zitang comments on his works as “not Chinese literature at all” and “not yet totally westernized.” In fact, his literary status is far more important than Taiwanese literati could have imagined during his lifetime. In order to re-evaluate his literary status, this paper begins by exploring the significance of Tokyo and foregrounds its articulation within Weng’s diasporic experience in his metropolitan literary space. Then, I discuss the adaptations made by Weng Nao to Japanese Neosensualist writing, which, I argue, can be considered as an expression of his resistance to colonial modernist values. Finally, I propose to utilize the sense of translation in order to understand how diasporic literature as an act of writing across cultures and nations can be seen as a process of code-switching between different cultural/linguistic systems, which carries across memories and cultures from one cultural context to another. In the terms of form, context and themes, Weng’s modified modernist Tokyo writing reveals his uniqueness and resistance towards both Japanocentrism and Eurocentrism, which distinguishes him as an outstanding Taiwanese diasporic writer rather than as merely a follower of Japanese Neosensualist literature.

Hybridities in a Metropolitan Diasporic Space – Weng Nao’s Literary Tokyo

This paper explores a hybrid space of Tokyo in the early twentieth century in the literary world of Taiwanese writer Weng Nao. Homi Bhabha’s theory will be adapted in order to further discuss hybridities and ambivalence in the metropolitan space within diasporic literature. Amongst other Taiwanese writers in the 1930s, Weng Nao was one of the few followers of Shin-kankakuha (the Neosensualist School), which was established by Japanese modernist writers such as Kawabata Yasunari, Tanizaki Jun’ichiro, Yokomitsu Riichi, Hayashi Fumiko and Sato Waruo, and insisted on presenting literary writing in the form of pure aesthetics. His new and modernist experimental techniques of literary representation and sophisticated descriptions of the loneliness of urban life and the inner desires of the human mind made his works distinct from those of other Taiwanese diasporic authors in the 1930s. However, with regard to his specific writing style and his detailed descriptions of innermost sexual desires, Weng’s works were far beyond what was deemed acceptable by East Asian or Taiwanese literary communities in the early twentieth century and received quite a significant amount of negative criticism. In addition, being long considered to be mocking the writing style of the Japanese Neosensualist School, Chinese critics such as Gu Zitang comments on his works as “not Chinese literature at all” and “not yet totally westernized.” In fact, his literary status is far more important than Taiwanese literati could have imagined during his lifetime. In order to re-evaluate his literary status, this paper begins by exploring the significance of Tokyo and foregrounds its articulation within Weng’s diasporic experience in his metropolitan literary space. Then, I discuss the adaptations made by Weng Nao to Japanese Neosensualist writing, which, I argue, can be considered as an expression of his resistance to colonial modernist values. Finally, I propose to utilize the sense of translation in order to understand how diasporic literature as an act of writing across cultures and nations can be seen as a process of code-switching between different cultural/linguistic systems, which carries across memories and cultures from one cultural context to another. In the terms of form, context and themes, Weng’s modified modernist Tokyo writing reveals his uniqueness and resistance towards both Japanocentrism and Eurocentrism, which distinguishes him as an outstanding Taiwanese diasporic writer rather than as merely a follower of Japanese Neosensualist literature.

THE SPECIFICS OF CHILDREN’S LITERATURE IN THE CONTEXT OF GENRE CLASSIFICATION

Establishing clear and sharp boundaries between children's literature and adult literature intended recipients is difficult if we restrict ourselves only to the evaluation of cosmetic and internal cognitive value of literary texts, as many children literary with pleasure can be read by both children and adults, while literary texts intended for adult readers, children can't fully understand. Age and intellectual, emotional and moral maturity reader directly imposes some specific features that must have and meet children's literature intended audience. In this paper, analytical and synthetic structuralist method, for examples in European literature, we examine the specifics of children's literature in the light of the genre classifications are caused by a particular type of literary purpose layer reader. We consider them in terms of themes, motifs and selection of literary characters. Subject in Children's Literature is at the advantages of form, language and ways of artistic material. Literary text has to be interesting to children and to respond to their large and diverse interests, so that children's literature is characterized by large thematic richness and layers. Attract the attention of children and impressive carved figures presented in their descriptions prevail portraits of psychological dimension of personality. Tests peculiarities of the composition of literary works aimed at children show its simplicity and the dominance of the actions and characters in action. Children's temperament is dynamic and can't draw slow and long story filled with meditative reflections and the outcome that occurs after digression delay. Research poetic language literary testimony of the children in the limelight clarity, a simplified form and the non-use of specific stylistic techniques, hard to understand symbols, metaphors and allusions, but this would not mean an absence of emotion, it is a literary statement that is both scenic and sensitive. Literature for children thematically, stylistically and structurally adapted to the intellectual, emotional and mental capabilities of children's reception and as such is an integral part of the overall literary art that is created and shaped within the general laws of literary poetics. DOI: 10.5901/mjss.2014.v5n19p243

Trading in 'Shakespeare'

Remarkably, for a book about Shakespeare during the period spanning his own lifetime, discussion of the man himself is refreshingly absent from most of Shakespeare and the Book Trade. Delivered as the Oxford Lyell Lectures in Bibliography in 2012, this book is instead an impressively wide-ranging study of Shakespeare's bibliographical presence from 1584. It is intended to accompany Erne's prior work, Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist, in dismantling the pervasive view that Shakespeare neither sought nor saw success as a print-published dramatic author. The central argument across the pair of studies is the opposite: that Shakespeare desired literary status for his plays, and it was the book trade that helped him achieve it. Alongside other titles of the last decade that focus on the playwright's presence in the book trade, such as Andrew Murphy's Shakespeare in Print, David Scott Kastan's Shakespeare and the Book, and Marta Straznicky's Shakespeare's Stationers, Erne's contribution assesses the publication of Shakespeare's plays within the field now broadly termed the history of the book. But more than these studies, Shakespeare and the Book Trade is focused throughout on playbooks rather than playtexts. It is distinguished by its sustained analysis of the printed plays and poetry as material that was produced for a particular bibliographical culture in which Shakespeare was becoming ‘a book trade commodity’ (p. 2), and by the author's choice to focus primarily on the quarto and octavo playbooks and poems. Underlying the entire work is an attention to under-studied agents within the book trade – the reading public who sought Shakespeare's titles for their shelves, and the lesser-known booksellers and stationers who traded in his name and crafted the physical make-up of his books.

Bantock and Southey: Musical Otherness and Fatalism in Thalaba the Destroyer

This article focuses on the epic poem Thalaba the Destroyer by Robert Southey (1774–1843) and its musical refiguring as an ‘orchestral poem’ of 1899 by the British composer Granville Bantock (1868–1946). Just as the recent reappraisal of Southey’s literary status has focused on concepts of orientalism and imperialism, this ideological framework can be used to explore Bantock and Southey’s contrasting attitudes towards the East. The complexities highlighted in Southey’s orientalism find a parallel in a range of stylistic layers identified in Bantock’s musical refiguring of ‘otherness’ in Thalaba; these include musical tropes associated with Tchaikovsky, confirming Bantock as a significant figure in the reception of Russian music in Britain at the turn of the twentieth century. Bantock’s approach to musical structure in Thalaba, contextualized via James Hepokoski’s theory of sonata deformation, highlights his experimental approach to the relationship between musical text and paratext, suggesting that his status should be reassessed.

10.5937/kultura1443103k = World and truth of literature: Camus urging reconciliation

The article seeks to situate motivationally Camus' vision of 'corrected creation' in literary and ideological controversies of his time. Relying on systematically unrepresented but numerous and explicit reflections on the status of literary and the role of artistic practice, it also intends to point to the theoretical argumenation and aesthetic justification of such a vision. Conclusion is that the seemingly reluctant Camus' position is the product of a conscious decision - and its implementation - that the task of the artist is primarily to understand and, contrary to the subversive doctrines of the salvation, with his rebellious announcement of considerate revival in the name of justice and beauty, to creatively testify contradictions of his own time and advocate perhaps unconceivable comprehensive reconciliation.

Comment le rapport au texte biblique transforme le rapport au texte littéraire au XVIIIe siècle : le cas Rousseau

In the 18th century, the Bible felt the full force of criticism by radical Enlightenment thinkers who read it piece by piece and denounced the process of its creation as an imposture – thus extending the break initiated by moral and historical critiques of the previous century. In doing so, they nevertheless failed to grant it the literary status of a “profane work”. Yet, Rousseau, who produced a literary rewriting of the Book of Judges with his Levite of Ephraim, pondered over the violence inflicted on biblical intertextuality during his exile in Môtiers: in his Letters Written from the Mountain, he compared it to the violence caused to his own literary works. By draw-ing this parallel, he opened a reflection on the different manners of reading a text, as well as the possibility of regulating the reader’s violence through proposing an ethics of literary reception. Analogy might not work as a substitute; however, it enabled Rousseau to go beyond the mistreatment which anti-philosophers or philosophers inflicted on his works, by giving, among other things, an autobiographical orienta-tion to his writing: one in which the author is ready to take responsibility for giving himself to the reader. The ambivalence of the sacred and the profane, the perception of a common essence of religion – defined either by sacrifice or gift – were thus what helped Rousseau invent the autobiographical pact.

Mark Twain, Memory, and the Failures of Historicism

I want to begin with the rather simple statement that Mark Twain’s autobiographies—and here I am referring mostly to Life on the Mississippi and the text we now call the Autobiography—hold open the past as a resource for slowing down time. In itself this isn’t a highly provocative claim; I imagine that many would agree that we find in Twain’s work a desire to hold off futurity. I think, too, that it is fair to say that his continual return to the materials of the past is in part motivated by modernity’s culture of planned obsolescence. Obsolescence becomes an issue when the speed of “progress” requires a diminishing of the present in addition to the past. Temporality, under modernity, is organized into the past, present, and a horizon of expectation known as the future. The future increasingly encroaches on the present by directing our thinking and desires forward; Twain well understood the risks and anxiety of this minimized present through the market logic of investment. Planned obsolesce exploits such anxieties through the introduction of looming future dates of expiration. While ancient, dead forms of culture were of no interest to Twain, those still-working elements of the past had some attraction. The ability to use these elements, to repeat certain experiences, to laugh twice at the same joke: these are what he understands to be threatened by obsolescence.1 While we recognize the extent to which narrative has broken down in his Autobiography—it is precisely this feature that has made this text’s reputation— we might not immediately link this formal feature to Twain’s anxious response to modernity. If we carefully consider how individual moments of breakdown are framed and what they might contribute to any possible larger narrative structure and authorial strategy, we expose what I would like to suggest we recognize as narrative leftovers or remainders. These originate in, and are signifiers of, a failure to fall into line with the requirements of a certain temporal

Crime Fiction, South Africa: A Critical Introduction

Crime fiction is an emergent category in South African literary studies. This introduction positions South African crime fiction and its scholarship in a global lineage of crime and detective fiction. The survey addresses the question of its literary status as ‘highbrow’ or ‘lowbrow’. It also identifies and describes two distinct sub-genres of South African crime fiction: the crime thriller novel; and the literary detective novel. The argument is that South African crime fiction exhibits a unique capacity for social analysis, a capacity which is being optimised by authors and interrogated by scholars.

Trebonius' Allusion to Lucilius (Cic. Fam. 12.16.3)

Recent readings of Fam. 12.16 have revealed that Trebonius' aim in writing to Cicero was the complicated result of anxieties over influence. I extend this complexity to Trebonius' citation of the satirist Lucilius and argue that Lucilius is mentioned for his literary status as well as libertas. Trebonius' satire was, in Lucilian vein, directed at the dead Julius Caesar, and Horace in turn refers obliquely in Satires 1.2 to Trebonius, and Cicero's literary representation of and connection with him.

Using Dictionary Evidence to Evaluate Authors’ Lexis: John Bunyan and the Oxford English Dictionary

This paper argues that voluntary readers for OED1 made citations from minor literary works in accordance with stereotypes about their language and content. They are, consequently, less well-represented in the dictionary than writers of higher literary status. The use of electronic databases in the OED3 revision process will tend to reduce these works’ existing coverage by antedating first citations from them, and by selecting citations from among a wider range of possible sources. While unusual uses in Shakespeare will not be removed as part of this revision process, it is highly unlikely that the nonce forms of less canonical authors will be inserted. In this way, the current revision process perpetuates the literary prejudices of the first edition.

The Ontology and Literary Status of the Screenplay:The Case of »Scriptfic«

Are screenplays - or at least some screenplays - works of literature? Until relatively recently, very few theorists had addressed this question. Thanks to recent work by scholars such as Ian W. Macdonald, Steven Maras, and Steven Price, theorizing the nature of the screenplay is back on the agenda after years of neglect (albeit with a few important exceptions) by film studies and literary studies (Macdonald 2004; Maras 2009; Price 2010). What has emerged from this work, however, is a general acceptance that the screenplay is ontologically peculiar and, as a result, a divergence of opinion about whether or not it is the kind of thing that can be literature.Specifically, recent discussion about the nature of the screenplay has tended to emphasize its putative lack of ontological autonomy from the film, its supposed inherent incompleteness, or both (Carroll 2008, 68-69; Maras 2009, 48; Price 2010, 38-42). Moreover, these sorts of claims about the screenplay's ontology - its essential nature - are often hitched to broader arguments. According to one such argument, a screenplay's supposed ontological tie to the production of a film is said to vitiate the possibility of it being a work of literature in its own right (Carroll 2008, 68-69; Maras 2009, 48). According to another, the screenplay's tenuous literary status is putatively explained by the idea that it is perpetually unfinished, akin to a Barthesian >> writerly text > Yes > Yes > No > scriptfic > scriptfic > scriptfic > Scriptfics > series > virtual series > airs << in the form of uploaded texts that usually either present an entirely original narrative (original virtual series), continue the storyline of an actual television series that has ended (virtual continuations), or use certain elements of an actual series as jumping-off points to tell an original story (virtual spin-offs).My central argument is that if the goal of theorizing the screenplay is to actually explain the evidence supplied by our practices, then theories that involve ontological claims about the screenplay's putative lack of ontological autonomy from the film and/or inherent incompleteness must be abandoned. I shall argue that virtual series traffic in screenplays that are ontologically autonomous works that have been finished by their authors in just the ways these theories claim they are not. If this is right, it follows that such accounts of the screenplay's ontology do not in fact offer reasons or explanations for denying that screenplays can be literature. This is because ontological claims are claims about the essential features of a given kind - that is, the features that the kind has of necessity.Virtual series screenplays offer strong evidence, I submit, that practitioners determine the boundaries of our screenplay concept, that our screenplay concept has changed over time, that we are now in an historical moment when some screenplays are complete, autonomous works, and that we are also now in an historical moment when some people write screenplays with the intention of creating literature while certain communities of readers appreciate them as such.

The Myth of American Ability: Cooper’s Leatherstocking, the Frontier Tradition, and the Making of the American Canon

Key Words: Disability; Able-bodiedness; Frontier; MythJames Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales have achieved canonical literary status in the US academy and provide a representative example of the frontier tradition in American writing. Through a close reading of Cooper’s first romance, I argue that America’s longstanding frontier narrative is predicated on the cultural projection of the able-bodied hero. In The Pioneers, Cooper relies on dueling constructions of disability and able-bodiedness to distinguish his white hero from his friend and Native American counterpart, Chingachgook. While Chingachgook’s disability provides the logic for his eventual suicide and removal from the narrative, Natty Bumppo’s strength of character becomes registered through the physical perfection of his body. In celebrating Natty Bumppo’s passage from old age in The Pioneers to new youth in The Deerslayer, the critical tradition surrounding the Leatherstocking series has tacitly endorsed Cooper’s corporeal hierarchy, suggesting that the myth of the American frontier relies upon a much deeper myth of American ability.

The Literary Status of Women Poets and Their Literary Field of Chinese Poems

The Literary Status of Women Poets and Their Literary Field of Chinese Poems

Improper Narratives: Egyptian Personal Blogs and the Arabic Notion of Adab

In recent years several international scholars have started to move beyond the social and political effect of blogging to define blogs in terms of literary writing (See Fitzpatrick, 2006; Himmer 2004; Van Dijk, 2004). Also in the Arab world, the fact that several blogs have been turned into books and have had considerable success, has provoked a debate over the literary status of blogs: while some critics hail them as a new literary experiment, others claim that they do not have the legitimacy to be included in the category of adab (literature). This has perhaps to do with the fact that in the Arab world (as elsewhere) printed books enjoy more prestige; but also with the fact that the Arab notion of adab is gradually coinciding, though still differing from the European notion of “literature”, and this defines the boundaries of the literary field. In other words, to claim that a work is “literary” because it has aspects of “literariness”, does not wholly correspond to saying that it is adabī , i.e. “literary” for Arab critics. In this article I will discuss aspects of literariness and adab-icity by means of an analysis of the blog al-Kanabah al-Ḥamrā (The Red Sofa), written by the Egyptian Bilāl Ḥusnī. The blog has been reviewed in several Egyptian newspapers and literary websites as “an interactive fiction” or a “ adabī /literary and visual blog”. However, its style, contents and materiality challenge both our notion of “literature” and the Arab concept of adab .

The End of Domesticity: Alienation from the Family in Dickens, Eliot, and James (review)

Reviewed by: The End of Domesticity: Alienation from the Family in Dickens, Eliot, and James Susan Honeyman Charles Hatten. The End of Domesticity: Alienation from the Family in Dickens, Eliot, and James. Newark: U of Delaware P, 2010. 316 pp. $67.50 (hardcover). Charles Hatten's The End of Domesticity: Alienation from the Family in Dickens, Eliot, and James will be a welcome contribution for readers interested in the development of and modern retreat from domestic narratives. In it Hatten explores a genealogy of emergent modernism within Victorian literature … examining one of modernism's defining themes as the problematic relation between the sexes caused by gender roles, a theme often expressed through the rejection of domestic idealization as a literary mode and its replacement by the representation of the family as a matrix of individual alienation. (257) In the attempt to trace this genealogy in domestic narratives, illustrating the genre and movements involved, this book will satisfy readers—Hatten provides an insightful reading of well-chosen texts to indicate the extent to which an increasing alienation from the family (as traditionally defined) resulted with the individualism and identity-commodification of industrialization. The argument suffers, however, from a lack of engaging recent gender theory, especially in the development of the equally important premise that alienation resulted from changing gender roles. Through his first two chapters, Hatten argues that, in order to establish himself as a mainstream author within an industrializing society, and yet to distance himself from women readers associated with the genre, Charles Dickens developed and popularized a revised familial ideology and technique that allowed for social [End Page 97] criticism to be deflected into a seemingly private (domestic) sphere. In an analysis of Dombey and Sons and Barnaby Rudge, with occasional asides on The Christmas Carol (which this reader greatly appreciated as especially resonant evidence), Hatten shows a process whereby, As Dickens's desire for high literary status comes in tension with the critical disesteem that female-centered sentimental novels fell into, and as he became aware of the limitations of domesticity as a realistic picture of families and as a tool for critiquing bourgeois society, his novels become increasingly conflicted in their affirmations of happy familial closures and ever more distanced from an idealized view of domesticity. (85) In chapter 3, which I enjoyed as one of the more interesting interpretations offered in the book, Hatten describes how Eliot, reacting particularly against Dickens, but ultimately against the rigidities of the domestic mode generally, writes in The Mill on the Floss (1860) British fiction's first great novel that radically subverts orthodox and gender ideology in a fully developed realist mode. This novel subtly questions the oversimplification and caricatures of the entire domestic genre. (35) Though I disagree with Hatten's choice in applying "radical" to Eliot, he provides a clear close reading to demonstrate his view. The next chapter provides analysis of Daniel Deronda in a closer investigation of marital alienation as well as individual isolation from community, demonstrating "the problem of the power of the marketplace to coerce and dehumanize individuals and social relationships" (36). These previous chapters set up a concrete critical context for reading Henry James, especially The Wings of the Dove, in chapter 5, highlighting the particularly antifamilial, antifeminist agenda James used in his modernization of domestic realism. Here I found interesting but somewhat problematic Hatten's return to the theme of "symbolic prostitution," which had initially been discussed with Dickens: "The image of the prostitute was thus available in the culture to express increasing fin de siècle anxieties about the reifications that were salient in a modern industrial society and the profound tensions everywhere visible over class and gender inequalities" (238). It is worth remarking that this trivializing use of prostitution as metaphor (especially for such aesthetic commodity-relations as a writer's to the public/market) is taken up by the two antifeminists of the writers that Hatten has chosen to cover—reflecting their own financial, if not gendered, privilege to make such a concrete degradation abstract. Perhaps Hatten identifies too closely with these authors when he later uses the term "spiritual prostitution" (256), although he does eventually qualify that "neither...

Myth and Literature in Modernity: A Question of Priority

The modernist turn to myth is well known but little understood. Yeats, Joyce, Lawrence, and Thomas Mann reinvented in practice a model of mythopoeia mooted theoretically by both Friedrich Schlegel and Friedrich von Schelling in 1800. The modernists did not typically articulate their mythopoeia philosophically, although Nietzsche had done this for them and provided a link with German thought on myth and aesthetics. The aesthetic becomes the modern equivalent of myth: literature assumes the function of myth. But the self-conscious aesthetic bracketing in modernist mythopoeia was not widely understood. And so there is a tradition running through the reception of T. S. Eliot and the theory of Northrop Frye which assimilated literature to myth, presenting literature as the secular articulation of an offstage religious world-view. Although 'myth criticism' of that kind has now largely faded from the Anglophone academy, another version has appeared in common understandings of 'magical realism'. Myth is a 'repressed' which will always return if its essentially literary status is not recognized.

Inter-marriage and The Last of the Mohicans, 1824-1992

In this essay, I examine the literary status of intermarriage in the American literature of the 1820s. The essay covers a set of “Indian narratives” produced in that decade, focusing on four “Indian novels” that provide instances of trans-cultural sexual and/or sentimental encounters. The set includes novels by Lidia Maria Child (Hobomok), Catharine Sedgwick (Hope Leslie) and Fenimore Cooper (The Last of the Mohicans, The Wept of Wish-ton-Wish). Leaning on the work done on domesticity and sentimental novels by women writers, I focus on how the outcomes of intermarriage are represented in each text. Specifically, I consider the ways of resistance and survival offered (or not offered) to trans-cultural families and their children. As a result, it can be argued that the examined authors do not produce a unique answer to the problem of intermarriage. What they all share, however, is the sense that a deeply human possibility of growth is lost with the Indian removal. In this sense, I conclude by comparing their work to Michael Mann’s 1992 The Last of the Mohicans to find that Mann’s approach is no great improvement on the ideology of the 1820s.

SEARCHING FOR THE GHOST IN THE MACHINE: THE ‘AFRICANIST’ PRESENCE IN MARK TWAIN'S THE ADVENTURES OF HUCKLEBERRY FINN

Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn has, despite moves to ban the book nationally as well as have it removed from Junior High School curricula because of its derogatory representation of African-Americans, maintained its status in the American literary canon. Race and racial representation are fundamental to the novel's plot and this paper extends their significance by arguing for the centrality of what Toni Morrison has identified as an ‘Africanist’ African-American presence that pervades and in fact, inspires America's founding literature. The paper argues that Twain's representation of the ‘Nigger’ Jim is contingent on an ‘Africanist’ African-American presence which, ‘real or fabricated’, is premised on a particular idea of blackness signified by Africans. Through a close study of blackface minstrelsy, entertainment popular in the nineteenth-century, this paper investigates (white) Western perceptions of Africa and Africans utilized in African-American literary representations. The paper thus suggests a re-reading of Huckleberry Finn that focuses on the ways in which Africa and Africans are implicated in and central to white and black Western constructions of identity. Far from re-hashing the now banal argument of the racist, and therefore unreadable, character of the novel, this paper hopes to stimulate new readings and discussions of Huckleberry Finn. That is, the paper attempts to interrogate critically the novel's canonical significance and its applicability to (black) African audiences seemingly far-removed from, but integral to, its racial ideology and its literary status, so linking global theories of identity as well as African and (African-) American literary studies.