It’s about damn time!!
Via Pop Eater:
Mark Twain’s classic ‘The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn’ is a piece of literary history, but publishing company NewSouth is electing to update the story for modern times by getting rid of the N-word.
Publishers Weekly reports a new version of the novel along with ‘The Adventures of Tom Sawyer’ will switch out the ever-controversial N-word for “slave.”
“This is not an effort to render Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn colorblind,” said Twain scholar Alan Gribben. “Race matters in these books. It’s a matter of how you express that in the 21st century.”
The project led by Gribben, a 69-year old English professor tapped to write the introduction for the edition, began when he read the book out loud to his students over the years and consciously replaced the word with “slave.” After several local teachers reached out to him about the same concerns, Gribben felt a change was desperately needed in order for Twain to keep his place in today’s classrooms.
Huckleberry Finn’ is still largely considered one of the most controversial novels directly because of its context with slavery, and has been threatened to be removed from classrooms for decades. “After a number of talks, I was sought out by local teachers, and to a person they said we would love to teach this novel, and Huckleberry Finn, but we feel we can’t do it anymore. In the new classroom, it’s really not acceptable,” Gribben said.
The N-word appears 219 times, and Gribben knows making the change won’t be smooth. “I’m hoping that people will welcome this new option, but I suspect that textual purists will be horrified,” he said. “Already, one professor told me that he is very disappointed that I was involved in this.”
The new edition, ‘Mark Twain’s Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn: The NewSouth Edition,’ is set for release in February.
This is good news……but why on earth did it take this long to realize that they needed to change the n-word word to something else? SMH…
