The Reception of Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn at Al Imam Mohammad Ibn Saud Islamic University

Abstract

In Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn two themes predominate—slavery and racism. Yet, students at Al Imam Mohammad Ibn Saud Islamic University seem oblivious to both themes; focusing instead on the moral degeneracy of certain characters, namely, pap Finn. Their reception of the text differs greatly from their Western counterparts who display a hostile reader-response to the novel on account of its reductive treatment of the black man. This study investigates the reasons behind Saudi students' disregard for social and historical issues in the novel which have led to its banning in most schools in the West. It achieves this through the employment of reception theory, a form of reader-response criticism proposed by the German theorist, Hans Robert Jauss. The study further employs the philosophies of literary critic Louise Rosenblatt, advanced in her highly acclaimed classic work, Literature as Exploration. Rosenblatt's unique theories prove highly influential in their ways of dealing with the literary text in general, the student of literature in particular.