textpert texts

• Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, 1884, (Missouri) 
• Huck Finn fakes his death to escape from his abusive father and Widow Douglas, who aims to 'civilise' him
• Huck embarks on a raft journey down the Mississippi River with Jim, a runaway slave
• Challenges faced during the river journey include dangerous waters, authorities hunting Jim for alleged murder, and encounters with characters like the 'Dauphin' and the 'Duke'
• Huck grapples with the decision to turn Jim in or help him achieve freedom, highlighting societal conflicts and moral dilemmas
• The story concludes with Jim being sold to the Phelps family, revealing Tom Sawyer as Huck's friend
• Huck and Tom devise a plan to free Jim
• Tom gets injured during the plan
• Jim sacrifices his chance at freedom to help Tom
• With the deaths of Huck's father and Jim's owner, they both find freedom
• Huck decides to flee west to Indian territory to avoid adoption by the Phelps
• Themes of Huckleberry Finn:

  Racism and slavery, Intellectual and moral education, Hypocrisy of ‘civilised’ society, Guilt/shame, Empathy, Adventure, Money/wealth
• Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie, 1900 (Chicago) 
• Heike Paul, Agrarianism, expansionism and the myth of the American West, 2014 (pg 11.)

  The West viewed as changing “with Euro-American settling expanding westward”, “connected to visions of an agrarian ideal [...] standing for authentic Americanness”  

  Agrarianism, “a dominant discourse in the foundational phase of the republic”

  Rurality “a cherished anachronism” 

  The mortgage system, “the pathology of the West [...] of which there is no cure” 

  The “American farm turned into an icon of the rural population’s collective suffering”