The Chinese journal Foreign Literature Studies has published a new essay co-authored by Professor of Comparative Literature Peter J. Rabinowitz and James Phelan of Ohio State University: “‘A True Book, with Some Stretchers’”—and Some Humbug: Twain, Huck and the Reader’s Experience of Huckleberry Finn.”

The article appears in a special cluster on western approaches to postclassical narratology, and is intended in part as a demonstration of the explanatory power of rhetorical narrative theory. To test their approach, Rabinowitz and Phelan take on longstanding questions about the effectiveness of the Evasion sequence at the end of Huckleberry Finn, concluding that Twain’s shift in narrative technique for the final chapters damages the reader’s experience.