In this book, Pr. Mouhamed Lemine Ould El Kettab examines

two samples of the literary works of two American writers: the novelist

Mark Twain and the literary critic Archibald McLeish.

In the first part of the book, the author delineates how in his two

novels, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures Of

Huckleberry Finn , Mark Twain highlights the refreshing beauty of

childhood's innocence as contrasted with the obnoxious sophistication

of the romantic culture and uses the spontaneous judgement of an

unschooled urchin, Huck Finn, to measure the validity of the social

values and to assess the ethic principals that the 19^th Century deep

South American society went by for decades.

In the second part, Pr. Mouhamed Lemine Ould El Kettab

strives to fathom the critical approach of Archibald McLeish to poetry

as a mode of artistic expression; he scrutinizes and often times takes

issue with some of the presuppositions on which A. McLeish's grounds

his critical tenets and bases his overall conception of poetry.