The events in the novel take place during the 1840s when Missouri was still a slave owning state。 Before the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861 the slave system was considered to be a natural and inevitable feature of social and economic life。 This system allowed white men to own Negroes and to treat them as they would treat farm animals。 While 1884, when Huckleberry Finn was published made it a controversial concern inevitably。 At that time the United States was a nation under repair。 As the country struggled to limit the damage done by the Civil War, its people had little time to worry about the state of those who had supposedly been freed by the war, and there appeared to be little concern for the worsening plight of blacks during the post-war period。
It was the book that shone people’s indifferent and numb thinking and even burn it again。 So, there was no surprise that the book seemed to be as reviled as it was loved by critics since its publication, with those who disapproved criticizing the book’s appeal to social misfits, and those who approved saying that it was a great adventure story with great characters。 It was also criticized upon release because of its coarse language and became even more controversial in the 20th century because of its perceived use of racial stereotypes and because of its frequent use of the racial slur “nigger,” despite strong arguments that the protagonist and the tenor of the book are anti-racist。 文献综述
No matter how controversial the book or Mark Twain himself is, no one can deny that Mark Twain has been called “the American Cervantes, our Homer, our Tolstoy, our Shakespeare, our Rablains。”(Fishkin,1998:1) Considered humorist, satirist, realist, the shaper of a distinctive American prose and narrative style, and preeminently the author of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, which is commonly accounted as one of the first great American novels, he with his masterpiece Huckleberry Finn has made differences in this world, especially the world of the blacks。