Jim
The Life and Afterlives of Huckleberry Finn’s Comrade
Format:Hardback
Publisher:Yale University Press
Publishing:24th Jun '25
£18.99
This title is due to be published on 24th June, and will be despatched as soon as possible.
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.
“Astute. . . . Sheds new light on a much-studied character.”—Publishers Weekly
“Fishkin—the intellectual colossus of Mark Twain’s work—has written an extraordinary and necessary explication of Twain’s iconic and transcendent character Jim—the moral arbiter of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.”—Min Jin Lee, author of Free Food for Millionaires
“Fishkin crowns her career as a distinguished Mark Twain scholar with this inspired study of his immortal Jim. Exhaustively researched and eloquently argued, it represents a singular service to our national self-knowledge.”—Arnold Rampersad, author of The Life of Langston Hughes
“Brilliant, original, persuasive, and comprehensive, Fishkin’s Jim is the definitive analysis of the most controversial and misunderstood character in American fiction—indispensable to comprehending Huckleberry Finn. A tour de force!”—Robert Paul Lamb, author of Art Matters: Hemingway, Craft, and the Creation of the Modern Short Story
“A captivating narrative about enslavement and racism well beyond the fictional character Jim.”—G. Faye Dant, founder of Jim’s Journey: The Huck Finn Freedom Center
“On first looking into Fishkin’s Jim I envisioned an Elysian toast: Mark says, ‘Jim, here’s to the gentlewoman who finally got you right.’ Jim says, ‘No, Mark, here’s to the brilliant scholar who got us both right.’”—David Bradley, author of The Chaneysville Incident
“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
ISBN: 9780300268324
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: unknown
456 pages