Sources are often a key part of your analysis of, discussion of, and arguments related to literary texts. You might cite literary criticism, reviews, debates about the merit of a poem or novel, or biographical studies. You also might cite an author’s letters, autobiographical writings, or even archival sources. Following is an excerpt from an essay by Jane Smiley that appeared in Harper’s magazine in 1996, entitled “Say It Ain’t So, Huck: Second Thoughts on Mark Twain’s Masterpiece.”
Although Huck had his fans at publication, his real elevation into the pantheon was worked out early in the Propaganda Era, between 1948 and 1955, by Lionel Trilling, Leslie Fiedler, T. S. Eliot, Joseph Wood Krutch, and some lesser lights, in the introductions to American and British editions of the novel and in such journals as Partisan Review and The New York Times Book Review. The requirements of Huck’s installation rapidly revealed themselves: the failure of the last twelve chapters (in which Huck finds Jim imprisoned on the Phelps plantation and Tom Sawyer is reintroduced and elaborates a cruel and unnecessary scheme for Jim’s liberation) had to be diminished, accounted for, or forgiven; after that, the novel’s special qualities had to be placed in the context first of other American novels (to their detriment) and then of world literature. The best bets here seemed to be Twain’s style and the river setting, and the critics invested accordingly: Eliot, who had never read the novel as a boy, traded on his own childhood beside the big river, elevating Huck to the Boy, and the Mississippi to the River God, therein finding the sort of mythic resonance that he admired. Trilling liked the river god idea, too, though he didn’t bother to capitalize it. He also thought that Twain, through Huck’s lying, told truths, one of them being (I kid you not) that “something…had gone out of American life after the [Civil War], some simplicity, some innocence, some peace.” What Twain himself was proudest of in the novel—his style—Trilling was glad to dub “not less than definitive in American literature. The prose of Huckleberry Finn established for written prose the virtues of American colloquial speech…. He is the master of the style that escapes the fixity of the printed page, that sounds in our ears with the immediacy of the heard voice, the very voice of unpretentious truth.” The last requirement was some quality that would link Huck to other, though “lesser,” American novels such as Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, that would possess some profound insight into the American character. Leslie Fiedler obligingly provided it when he read homoerotic attraction into the relationship between Huck and Jim, pointing out the similarity of this to such other white man–dark man friendships as those between Ishmael and Queequeg in Moby-Dick and Natty Bumppo and Chingachgook in James Fenimore Cooper’s Last of the Mohicans.
The canonization proceeded apace: great novel (Trilling, 1950), greatest novel (Eliot, 1950), world-class novel (Lauriat Lane Jr., 1955). Sensible naysayers, such as Leo Marx, were lost in the shuffle of propaganda. But, in fact, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn has little to offer in the way of greatness. There is more to be learned about the American character from its canonization than through its canonization.
(1996)
The paragraphs here are the second and third paragraphs of Smiley’s essay, in which she debunks the claim that The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is the novel “all American literature grows out of.” She establishes herself as well-read on the subject of Twain’s novel by reviewing the literature about the novel before she embarks on her own claims that the “canonization” of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is more interesting as a comment on the American character than the book itself. She cites literary experts such as critics Leslie Fiedler and Lionel Trilling, as well as writers such as T. S. Eliot. She names the publications in which their commentary appeared—Partisan Review, New York Times Book Review—and both quotes and paraphrases the ideas of these writers. Smiley takes on the big names in American literature criticism, but her argument would be much weaker had she not acknowledged the praise of those who had, as she notes, elevated The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn into the “pantheon” of great American literature.