Shelley Fisher Fishkin Jim recensie, review en informatie biografie en boek over het leven en het hiernamaals van de kameraad van Huckleberry Finn. Op 15 april 2025 verschijnt in de reeks Black Lives van Yale University Press de biografie van Jim de kameraad van Huckleberry Finn uit de roman van Mark Twain, geschreven door de Amerikaanse professor Shelley Fisher Fishkin. Hier lees je informatie over de inhoud van het boek, de auteur en over de uitgave. Een Nederlandse vertaling van de biografie is niet verkrijgbaar.

Shelley Fisher Fishkin Jim recensie, review en informatie

• “Fishkin stands at the pinnacle of Mark Twain studies and criticism. Her astonishing gifts have taken her, and us, far beyond the often-cramped field of enquiries into Mark Twain. She has stood virtually alone in her insistence on race as the thematic foundation of Mark Twain’s literary greatness, producing books, essays, papers and lectures that break open the deceptively bland yet wickedly subtle strategies through which Twain became a defiant truth-teller. …Jim, at the end, is nothing short of a call to hope: hope that even in morally chaotic times such as ours, words—written well, read responsibly, and evaluated with bold sophistication—can save us.” (Ron Powers, author of Mark Twain: a Life)

Jim

The Life and Afterlives of Huckleberry Finn’s Comrade

• Auteur: Shelley Fisher Fishkin (Verenigde Staten)
• Soort boek: biografie
• Taal: Engels
• Uitgever: Yale University Press
• Reeks: Black Lives
• Verschijnt: 15 april 2025
• Omvang: 464 pagina’s
• Uitgave: gebonden boek / ebook
• Prijs: $ 28,00
• Boek bestellen bij: Amazon / Bol

Flaptekst van het boek over de kameraad van Huckleberry Finn

The origins and influence of Jim, Mark Twain’s beloved yet polarizing literary figure.

Mark Twain’s Jim, introduced in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), is a shrewd, self‑aware, and enormously admirable enslaved man, one of the first fully drawn Black fathers in American fiction. Haunted by the family he has left behind, Jim acts as father figure to Huck, the white boy who is his companion as they raft the Mississippi toward freedom. Jim is also a highly polarizing figure: he is viewed as an emblem both of Twain’s alleged racism and of his opposition to racism; a diminished character inflected by minstrelsy and a powerful challenge to minstrel stereotypes; a reason for banning Huckleberry Finn and a reason for teaching it; an embarrassment and a source of pride for Black readers.

Eminent Twain scholar Shelley Fisher Fishkin probes these controversies, exploring who Jim was, how Twain portrayed him, and how the world has responded to him. Fishkin also follows Jim’s many afterlives: in film, from Hollywood to the Soviet Union; in translation around the world; and in American high school classrooms today. The result is Jim as we have never seen him before—a fresh and compelling portrait of one of the most memorable Black characters in American fiction.

Shelley Fisher Fishkin was born 9 may 1950. She is the Joseph S. Atha Professor of Humanities, professor of English, and professor (by courtesy) of African and African American Studies at Stanford University. She is the author or editor of many books, including Writing America: Literary Landmarks from Walden Pond to Wounded Knee and Was Huck Black? Mark Twain and African American Voices, and editor of the twenty-nine-volume Oxford Mark Twain. She lives in Stanford, California.

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