Review

In writing my nineteenth century review of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, I focused mainly on the critics' form and wrote my criticism accordingly. The first thing that may be noticed in reading my review is that I put the title of the novel in quotations marks rather than in italics. My justification for this is that when I was reading over the actual criticisms of the play, many of the authors had the title in quotation marks. Only Athenaeum and Saturday Review had the title of the book in italics, so I went with the pattern that was used most frequently.

The most perceptible feature of my review is the form in which it is written. I noticed that none of the reviews I read had an indents to start a new paragraph; rather, they just started by adding space between the paragraphs. I also noticed that they didn't put quotations from the novel in quotations. In the reviews, they just put spaces in between their thoughts and quotes from the book. I set my review up in basically the same way.

Another aspect of my paper that I derived from the reviews that I read was having no thesis statement, nothing to direct my reader in my line of thought. Each article that I read was lacking a thesis statement, so I decided that I would not include one. Although I did have a starting point, I didn't clearly define where I planned to go with my logic. By not having a thesis statement, the reviews seemed random in their thought processes. It was like one idea piled on top of the other with no explanation on their thoughts at all; I attempted to do my criticism similar to this.

I also used the word "negro" in my evaluation of the novel because the word was suitable in the nineteenth century and was not offensive. In the other reviews, the authors use the word "negro" in place of slave or African American or black. I did the same in order to provide a more realistic representation of a nineteenth century review.

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