I do hope the following isn't woefully beside the point; I think that, actually, the following is applicable, and an opinion worth scholarly consideration (note: I'm no book banner--I say, read _Huck Finn_). The quotation (a very interesting one, although it almost cries 'conspiracy theory!') is from Barbara Herrnstein Smith's article, "Contingencies of Value," as it appeared in _Critical Inquiry_ 10 (September 1983): [W]hen the value of a work is seen as unquestionable, those of its features that would, in a noncanonical work, be found alienating...will be glozed over or backgrounded. In particular, features that conflict intolerably with the interests and ideologies of subsequent subjects (and, in the West, with those generally benign "humanistic" values for which canonical works are commonly celebrated)--for example, incidents or sentiments of brutality, bigotry, and racial sexual or national chauvinism--will be represented or rationalized, and there will be a tendency among humanistic scholars and academic critics to "save the text" by transferring the locus of interest to more formal or structural features and/or allegorizing its potentially alienating ideology to some more general ("universal") level where it becomes more tolerable and also more readily interpretable in terms of contemporary ideologies. Thus we make texts timeless by suppressing their temporality. (It may be added that to those scholars and critics for whom those features are not only palatable but for whom the value of the canonical works consists precisely in their "embodying" and "preserving" such "traditional values," the transfer of the locus of value to fromal properties will be seen as a descent into formalism and "aestheticism," and the tendency to alegorize it too generally or to interpret it too readily in terms of "modern values" will be seen not as saving the text but betraying it.) ...Rivka Swenson