Until now, no book-length study has traced the tumultuous publishing history of Uncle Tom's Cabin, the most famous of antislavery novels. Claire Parfait follows the trail over 150 years, along the ...way addressing the conditions of female authorship, the structures of copyright, author-publisher relations, agency, and literary economics. Scholars of Stowe, of American literature and culture, and of publishing history will find this impressive and compelling work invaluable.
Uncle Tom Spingarn, Adena; Gates, Henry Louis, Jr
2018, 2018-06-05
eBook
Uncle Tom charts the dramatic cultural transformation of perhaps the most controversial literary character in American history. From his origins as the heroic, Christ-like protagonist of Harriet ...Beecher Stowe's anti-slavery novel, the best-selling book of the nineteenth century after the Bible, Uncle Tom has become a widely recognized epithet for a black person deemed so subservient to whites that he betrays his race. Readers have long noted that Stowe's character is not the traitorous sycophant that his name connotes today. Adena Spingarn traces his evolution in the American imagination, offering the first comprehensive account of a figure central to American conversations about race and racial representation from 1852 to the present. We learn of the radical political potential of the novel's many theatrical spinoffs even in the Jim Crow era, Uncle Tom's breezy disavowal by prominent voices of the Harlem Renaissance, and a developing critique of "Uncle Tom roles" in Hollywood. Within the stubborn American binary of black and white, citizens have used this rhetorical figure to debate the boundaries of racial difference and the legacy of slavery. Through Uncle Tom, black Americans have disputed various strategies for racial progress and defined the most desirable and harmful images of black personhood in literature and popular culture.
Uncle Tom’s Cabin broke publishing records and made Harriet Beecher Stowe in her time one of the world’s most famous authors. The book was a bestseller in Britain and was translated into some forty ...languages. Yet today Stowe tends to be seen wholly in the context of American literary history. Transatlantic Stowe: Harriet Beecher Stowe and European Culture is the first book to consider multiple aspects of Stowe’s career in an international context. The groundbreaking essays of Transatlantic Stowe examine the author’s literary and literal forays in Europe and the ways in which intellectual and cultural exchanges between the Old and New Worlds shaped her work. It was a crucial moment in the transatlantic discourse, a turning of the tide, and Stowe was among the first American novelists to be lionized in Europe---and pirated by publishers---in the same way that European writers had been treated in America.Blending historical and cultural criticism and drawing on fresh primary material from London and Paris, Transatlantic Stowe includes essays exploring Stowe’s relationship with European writers and the influence of her European travels on her work, especially the controversial travel narrative Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands and her “Italian novel" Agnes of Sorrento.Interdisciplinary and itself transatlantic, the collection discusses visual art and material culture as well as literature and politics and includes contributions from Britain, Ireland, and the United States. Together these essays offer new interpretations of Stowe’s most popular novel as well as new readings of her many other works, illuminate the myriad connections between Stowe and European writers, and thus rewrite literary history by returning Stowe to the larger political, historical, and literary contexts of nineteenth-century Europe.
Through the publication of her bestseller Uncle Tom's Cabin, Harriet Beecher Stowe became one of the most internationally famous and important authors in nineteenth-century America. Today, her ...reputation is more complex, and Uncle Tom's Cabin has been debated and analysed in many different ways. This book provides a summary of Stowe's life and her long career as a professional author, as well as an overview of her writings in several different genres. Synthesizing scholarship from a range of perspectives, the book positions Stowe's work within the larger framework of nineteenth-century culture and attitudes about race, slavery and the role of women in society. Sarah Robbins also offers reading suggestions for further study. This introduction provides students of Stowe with a richly informed and accessible introduction to this fascinating author.
How does political change take hold? In the 1850s, politicians and
abolitionists despaired, complaining that the "North, the poor
timid, mercenary, driveling North" offered no forceful opposition
to ...the power of the slaveholding South. And yet, as John L. Brooke
proves, the North did change. Inspired by brave fugitives who
escaped slavery and the cultural craze that was Uncle Tom's
Cabin , the North rose up to battle slavery, ultimately waging
the bloody Civil War. While Lincoln's alleged quip about the little
woman who started the big war has been oft-repeated, scholars have
not fully explained the dynamics between politics and culture in
the decades leading up to 1861. Rather than simply viewing the
events of the 1850s through the lens of party politics, "There
Is a North" is the first book to explore how cultural
action-including minstrelsy, theater, and popular
literature-transformed public opinion and political structures.
Taking the North's rallying cry as his title, Brooke shows how the
course of history was forever changed.
Harriet Beecher Stowe's 1852 antislavery novel Uncle Tom's Cabin was the nineteenth century's best-selling novel worldwide; only the Bible outsold it. It was known not only as a book but through ...stage productions, films, music, and commercial advertising as well. But how was Stowe's novel—one of the watershed works of world literature—actually received outside of the American context? True Songs of Freedom explores one vital sphere of Stowe's influence: Russia and the Soviet Union, from the 1850s to the present day. Due to Russia's own tradition of rural slavery, the vexed entwining of authoritarianism and political radicalism throughout its history, and (especially after 1945) its prominence as the superpower rival of the United States, Russia developed a special relationship to Stowe's novel during this period of rapid societal change. Uncle Tom's Cabin prompted widespread reflections on the relationship of Russian serfdom to American slavery, on the issue of race in the United States and at home, on the kinds of writing appropriate for children and peasants learning to read, on the political function of writing, and on the values of Russian educated elites who promoted, discussed, and fought over the book for more than a century. By the time of the Soviet Union's collapse in 1991, Stowe's novel was probably better known by Russians than by readers in any other country. John MacKay examines many translations and rewritings of Stowe's novel; plays, illustrations, and films based upon it; and a wide range of reactions to it by figures famous (Leo Tolstoy, Ivan Turgenev, Marina Tsvetaeva) and unknown. In tracking the reception of Uncle Tom's Cabin across 150 years, he engages with debates over serf emancipation and peasant education, early Soviet efforts to adapt Stowe's deeply religious work of protest to an atheistic revolutionary value system, the novel's exploitation during the years of Stalinist despotism, Cold War anti-Americanism and antiracism, and the postsocialist consumerist ethos.
The frontier romance, an enormously popular genre of American fiction born in the 1820s, helped redefine 'race' for an emerging national culture. The novels of James Fenimore Cooper, Lydia Maria ...Child, Catharine Maria Sedgwick and others described the 'races' in terms of emotional rather than physical characteristics. By doing so they produced the idea of 'racial sentiment': the notion that different races feel different things, and feel things differently. Ezra Tawil argues that the novel of white-Indian conflict provided authors and readers with an apt analogy for the problem of slavery. By uncovering the sentimental aspects of the frontier romance, Tawil redraws the lines of influence between the 'Indian novel' of the 1820s and the sentimental novel of slavery, demonstrating how Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin ought to be reconsidered in this light. This study reveals how American literature of the 1820s helped form modern ideas about racial differences.
O'Loughlin examines the novel Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe. He reviews elements of the critical and publication history of Uncle Tom's Cabin in order to examine the novel's place within ...American culture. Some scholars see the novel as having played an essential role in the lead-up to the Civil War, while others view it as having had a minor historical impact at best. He argues that Uncle Tom's Cabin, as a widely read, culturally available narrative became an important text for understanding why the Civil War began. To support that point, he discusses Abraham Lincoln and his second Inaugural Address. He notes that the most important historical effect of Uncle Tom's Cabin did not have to do with causing the war but with explaining it.
This book shows how abolitionists used rhetoric and discourse, rather than violence, to change opinions about slavery. Books like Uncle Toms Cabin incite people to take action and they provoke a ...sense of urgency about the matter. Less than a decade before an impending civil war the United States enacted the Compromise of 1850, which among other things revived the Fugitive Slave Law of 1793 in a more aggravated form. The main stipulation of the law was to impose strict monetary and legal penalties against those who aided the escape or impeded the capture of fugitive slaves. Frederick Douglass and Harriet Beecher Stowe urged Americans to break the Fugitive Slave Law and free blacks across America. These are the most important texts from the American Antebellum Era that dealt with slavery and emancipation. This book explores the implications of the Fugitive Slave Law and the impact that these two figures had during that time period in American history. The argument is that Douglass and Stowe used language instead of violence to convince Americans to break the law, and that not all Americans agreed with the law.
