Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: Percival Everett’s novel James won the National Book Award for Fiction and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2024. This masterful retelling of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, narrated from the perspective of the enslaved Jim/James, offers a key point of engagement with the questions of who and what regulates access to the means of material and literary production—and who, consequently, is entitled to a voice in the American democratic machinery. In his reading of the novel, Professor Emeritus Robert Stepto explores the ways in which Black identity and literacy interact with, and speak back to, the “whiteness” of Huckleberry Finn’s own canonical status.
Source: New American Studies Journal
DOI: 10.18422/76-2097
Author: Robert Burns Stepto
Institution: University of Göttingen
Language: English
Subfield: Literature and Literary Theory
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
SDG: Reduced inequalities
Open Access status: hybrid
OpenAlex ID: W4407195628