Domestic Biographies: Stowe, Howells, James, and Wharton at Home
Elif S. Armbruster
Domestic Biographies: Stowe, Howells, James, and Wharton at Home presents comparative domestic biographies of four American Realist writers: Harriet Beecher Stowe, William Dean Howells, Henry James, and Edith Wharton. Drawing upon extensive primary sources to reconstruct the authors’ private lives, Domestic Biographies illuminates how they lived when no one was looking. In particular this book examines how the authors worked and wrote at home and how their home life in turn made its way into their novels and non-fiction. Domestic Biographies offers an innovative and exciting architectural and domestic lens through which to study the lives and literature of America’s best-known Realists.
Mightier Than the Sword: Uncle Tom's Cabin and the Battle for America
David S. Reynolds
In this wide-ranging, brilliantly researched work, David S. Reynolds traces the factors that made Uncle Tom’s Cabin the most influential novel ever written by an American. Upon its 1852 publication, the novel’s vivid depiction of slavery polarized its American readership, ultimately widening the rift that led to the Civil War. Reynolds also charts the novel’s afterlife―including its adaptation into plays, films, and consumer goods―revealing its lasting impact on American entertainment, advertising, and race relations
Novel Bondage: Slavery, Marriage, and Freedom in Nineteenth-Century America
Tess Chakkalakal
Novel Bondage unravels the interconnections between marriage, slavery, and freedom through renewed readings of canonical nineteenth-century novels and short stories by black and white authors. Situating close readings of fiction alongside archival material concerning the actual marriages of authors such as Lydia Maria Child, Harriet Beecher Stowe, William Wells Brown, and Frank J. Webb, Chakkalakal examines how these early novels established literary conventions for describing the domestic lives of American slaves in describing their aspirations for personal and civic freedom. Exploring this theme in post-Civil War works by Frances E.W. Harper and Charles Chesnutt, she further reveals how the slave-marriage plot served as a fictional model for reforming marriage laws. Chakkalakal invites readers to rethink the "marital work" of nineteenth-century fiction and the historical role it played in shaping our understanding of the literary and political meaning of marriage, then and now.
Republic of Words: The Atlantic Monthly and Its Writers, 1857-1925
Susan Goodman
A record of Atlantic Monthly authors reads like a Who’s Who of American literature. The magazine’s stable of contributors included Mark Twain, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Frederick Douglass, Louisa May Alcott, Sarah Orne Jewett, Kate Chopin, Henry Adams, Frank Norris, Jack London, Henry James, Owen Wister, Robert Frost, and many others.
In Republic of Words, Susan Goodman brilliantly captures this emerging culture of arts, ideas, science, and literature of an America in its adolescence, as filtered through the intersecting lives and words of the best and brightest writers of the day. Through this lens, Goodman examines the life of the magazine from its emergence in 1857 through the 1920s.
The Politics of Anxiety in Nineteenth-Century American Literature
Justine S. Murison
For much of the nineteenth century, the nervous system was a medical mystery, inspiring scientific studies and exciting great public interest. Because of this widespread fascination, the nerves came to explain the means by which mind and body related to each other. By the 1830s, the nervous system helped Americans express the consequences on the body, and for society, of major historical changes. Literary writers, including Nathaniel Hawthorne and Harriet Beecher Stowe, used the nerves as a metaphor to re-imagine the role of the self amidst political, social and religious tumults, including debates about slavery and the revivals of the Second Great Awakening. Representing the 'romance' of the nervous system and its cultural impact thoughtfully and, at times, critically, the fictional experiments of this century helped construct and explore a neurological vision of the body and mind. Murison explains the impact of neurological medicine on nineteenth-century literature and culture.
Uncle Tom's Cabin and the Reading Revolution: Race, Literacy, Childhood, and Fiction, 1851-1911
Barbara Hochman
"Uncle Tom's Cabin" and the Reading Revolution explores a transformation in the cultural meaning of Stowe's influential book by addressing changes in reading practices and a shift in widely shared cultural assumptions. These changes reshaped interpretive conventions and generated new meanings for Stowe's text in the wake of the Civil War.
During the 1850s, men, women, and children avidly devoured Stowe's novel. White adults wept and could not put the book down, neglecting work and other obligations to complete it. African Americans both celebrated and denounced the book. By the 1890s, readers understood Uncle Tom's Cabin in new ways. Prefaces and retrospectives celebrated Stowe's novel as a historical event that led directly to emancipation and national unity. Commentaries played down the evangelical and polemical messages of the book.
Illustrations and children's editions projected images of entertaining and devoted servants into an open-ended future. In the course of the 1890s, Uncle Tom's Cabin became both a more viciously racialized book than it had been and a less compelling one. White readers no longer consumed the book at one sitting; Uncle Tom's Cabin was now more widely known than read. However, in the growing silence surrounding slavery at the turn of the century, Stowe's book became an increasingly important source of ideas, facts, and images that the children of ex-slaves and other free-black readers could use to make sense of their position in U.S. culture.
A Home Elsewhere: Reading African American Classics in the Age of Obama
Robert B. Stepto
In this series of interlocking essays, which had their start as lectures inspired by the presidency of Barack Obama, Robert Burns Stepto sets canonical works of African American literature in conversation with Obama’s Dreams from My Father. The elegant readings that result shed surprising light on unexamined angles of works ranging from Frederick Douglass’s Narrative to W. E. B. Du Bois’s Souls of Black Folk to Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon.
Stepto draws our attention to the concerns that recur in the books he takes up: how protagonists raise themselves, often without one or both parents; how black boys invent black manhood, often with no models before them; how protagonists seek and find a home elsewhere; and how they create personalities that can deal with the pain of abandonment. These are age-old themes in African American literature that, Stepto shows, gain a special poignancy and importance because our president has lived through these situations and circumstances and has written about them in a way that refreshes our understanding of the whole of African American literature.
Stepto amplifies these themes in four additional essays, which investigate Douglass’s correspondence with Harriet Beecher Stowe; Willard Savoy’s novel Alien Land and its interracial protagonist; the writer’s understanding of the reader in African American literature; and Stepto’s account of his own schoolhouse lessons, with their echoes of Douglass’ and Obama’s experiences.
Charles Testut's Le Vieux Salomon: Race, Religion, Socialism, and Freemasonry
Sheri Lyn Abel
Through the study of Charles Testut's Le Vieux Salomon, a nineteenth-century southern Francophone antislavery novel, this book encourages a reassessment of the southern experience and of the canon of southern literature. Abel argues that Testut's distinctiveness lies in his French intellectual heritage and in his awareness of the rich historical and cultural links between the ethnic legacies of Louisiana and the French Caribbean. Le Vieux Salomon is marked by a sense of place through the author's identification with two regions colonized by the French and which are symbolically represented in the bodies of his black protagonists. In this mulatto couple converge the history and memory of French colonization in the Antilles and Louisiana.
Exploring Testut's influences, from Masonic symbolism and principles through nineteenth-century French socialist thought, the book shows how Testut endeavors, through his construction of raced and gendered identity in his protagonists, to eradicate the association of blackness with inferiority. It finishes with a comparative study between Le Vieux Salomon and Harriett Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin to demonstrate how Testut's perspective as a French southern local writer sets him apart from Stowe's Northern view, further emphasizing Testut's contribution to the formulation of a southern cultural and literary identity.
Owning Up: Privacy, Property, and Belonging in U. S. Women's Life Writing
Katherine Adams
Owning Up provides a new model for interpreting the U.S. discourse on privacy. Focusing on the formative period of the nineteenth century, Adams shows that conceptions of privacy became meaningful only when posed in opposition to the encroaching forces of market capitalism and commodification. Even as Americans came to regard privacy as a natural right and to identify it with sacred ideals of democratic freedom, they also learned to think of it as fragile and under threat. Owning Up argues that narratives of violation and dispossession played a fundamental role in the emergence of U.S. privacy discourse and in the influence this discourse continues to exert within U.S. culture.
Using biographical and autobiographical writing by and about women writers including Sojourner Truth, Margaret Fuller, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Elizabeth Keckley, and Louisa May Alcott, Adams traces the figure of imperiled privacy across five decades. Where previous studies of early American privacy have focused on white femininity and middle-class domesticity as defining features, Owning Up contends that privacy is an empty category. Without a fixed content of its own, privacy acquires meaning only by being articulated-and constantly re-articulated-against threats of invasion and loss. Chapters look at how such narratives operate within particular political and economic contexts, including antebellum reform, racial reconstruction, free labor ideology, and laissez faire social Darwinism. The analysis concludes at the end of the century with calls for legislation to protect the individual's "right to be let alone," a culminating moment in the discourse of threatened privacy that informs the American sense of self to this day.
Shades of Green: Visions of Nature in the Literature of American Slavery
Ian Finseth
Shades of Green offers a creative reimagining of early and antebellum American literary culture by exploring the complex web of relationships linking racial thought to natural science and natural imagery. The book charts a dynamic shift in both polemical and imaginative literature during the century before the Civil War, as scientific, artistic, and spiritual vocabularies regarding “nature;” became increasingly important for authors seeking to mobilize public opinion against slavery or to redefine racial identity. Finseth argues that these vocabularies both liberated and constrained antislavery philosophy and, more broadly, that our understanding of race in early American literature must take the natural world into account. In doing this, Finseth fuses a cultural history of the period with fresh readings of such major figures as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Frederick Douglass.
Drawing on a range of theoretical and disciplinary perspectives, including aesthetics, anthropology, phenomenology, and ecocriticism, Shades of Green demonstrates the agility with which human thought about the natural and the racial leapt across formal epistemological, professional, and artistic boundaries. In this innovative account, the politics of race and slavery are shown to have been deeply intertwined with putatively apolitical cultural understandings of the natural world. The book will be of value to scholars in a variety of disciplines, including American studies, African American literary history, and environmental philosophy.
Stowe in Her Own Time: A Biographical Chronicle of Her Life, Drawn from Recollections, Interviews, and Memoirs by Family, Friends, and Associates
Susan Belasco
One of the first celebrity authors, Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-1896) became famous almost overnight when "Uncle Tom's Cabin" - which sold more than 300,000 copies in its first year of publication - appeared in 1852. Known by virtually all famous writers in the United States and many in England and regarded by many women writers as a role model because of her influence in the literary marketplace, Stowe herself was the subject of many books, articles, essays, and poems during her lifetime. This volume brings together for the first time a range of primary materials about Stowe's private and public life written by family members, friends, and fellow writers who knew or were influenced by her before and after "Uncle Tom's Cabin" catapulted her to fame. Included are periodical articles by Fanny Fern and Charles Dudley Warner; biographical essays by Sarah Josepha Hale and Rose Terry Cooke; letters by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and Harriet Jacobs; recollections by Frederick Douglass, Annie Adams Fields, Isabella Beecher Hooker, and Charles Beecher; and poems by Paul Laurence Dunbar and John Greenleaf Whittier. An introduction at the beginning of each essay connects it to its historical and cultural context, explanatory notes provide information about people and places, and the book includes a detailed introduction and a chronology of Stowe's life. The thirty-eight recollections gathered in "Stowe in Her Own Time" form a biographical narrative designed to provide several perspectives on the famous author, sometimes in conflict and sometimes in agreement but always perceptive. The figure who emerges from this insightful, analytical collection is far more complex than the image she helped construct in her lifetime.
Loves of Harriet Beecher Stowe
Philip McFarland
“So you’re the little lady who started the war,” Abraham Lincoln is rumored to have said when he met the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin on the eve of the Emancipation Proclamation. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s groundbreaking novel forced an ambivalent North to confront the atrocities of slavery, yet her accomplishment was just one of many of the Beechers, the most eminent American family of the nineteenth century. In this intimate account, historian Philip McFarland follows the Beecher clan to the frontier boom town of Cincinnati, where Harriet’s glimpses of slavery across the Kentucky border moved her to pen Uncle Tom’s Cabin. We meet Harriet’s foremost loves: her father Lyman, her husband Calvin, and her brother, Henry Ward Beecher, the most famous preacher of his time whose trial for adultery riveted the nation. And as McFarland traces the arc of Harriet’s literary career from her hardscrabble beginnings as a freelancer to her ascendancy as the most renowned writer of the age, he crafts her family’s story into a detailed rendering of mid-nineteenth-century America in the midst of social and demographic explosions that are still being felt to this day.
Private Sphere to World Stage from Austen to Eliot
Elizabeth Sabiston
Emily Dickinson's poem, 'This is my letter to the World/ That never wrote to Me --', opens the Introduction, which focuses on the near-anonymity of nineteenth-century women novelists. Close readings of works by five British novelists—Jane Austen, Charlotte and Emily Brontë, Elizabeth Gaskell, and George Eliot—offer persuasive accounts of the ways in which women used stealth tactics to outmaneuver their detractors. Chapters examine the 'hidden manifesto' in Austen's works, whose imaginative heroines defend women's writing; the lasting impact of Jane Eyre, with its modest heroine who takes up the pen to tell her own story, even on male writers outside the English tradition; Cathy's testament as the 'ghost-text' of Wuthering Heights; and the shifting gender roles in Daniel Deronda, with its silenced heroine and androgynous hero. Though the focus is on British novelists, Sabiston's discussion of the Anglo-American connections in the factory novels of Elizabeth Gaskell and the slavery writings of Harriet Beecher Stowe has particular relevance for its demonstration of how the move from the private to the public sphere enables and even compels the blurring of national and ethnic boundaries. What emerges is a compelling argument for the relevance of these novelists to the emergence in our own time of hitherto-silenced female voices around the globe.
Slavery on Trial: Law, Abolitionism, and Print Culture
Jeannine Marie DeLombard
America's legal consciousness was high during the era that saw the imprisonment of abolitionist editor William Lloyd Garrison, the execution of slave revolutionary Nat Turner, and the hangings of John Brown and his Harpers Ferry co-conspirators. Jeannine Marie DeLombard examines how debates over slavery in the three decades before the Civil War employed legal language to "try" the case for slavery in the court of public opinion via popular print media.
Discussing autobiographies by Frederick Douglass, a scandal narrative about Sojourner Truth, an abolitionist speech by Henry David Thoreau, sentimental fiction by Harriet Beecher Stowe, and a proslavery novel by William MacCreary Burwell, DeLombard argues that American literature of the era cannot be fully understood without an appreciation for the slavery debate in the courts and in print. Combining legal, literary, and book history approaches, Slavery on Trial provides a refreshing alternative to the official perspectives offered by the nation's founding documents, legal treatises, statutes, and judicial decisions. DeLombard invites us to view the intersection of slavery and law as so many antebellum Americans did--through the lens of popular print culture.
The Cambridge Introduction to Harriet Beecher Stowe
Sarah Robbins
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.
The Publishing History of Uncle Tom's Cabin, 1852-2002
Claire Parfait
Uncle Tom's Cabin continues to provoke impassioned discussions among scholars; to serve as the inspiration for theater, film, and dance; and to be the locus of much heated debate surrounding race relations in the United States. It is also one of the most remarkable print-based texts in U.S. publishing history. And yet, until now, no book-length study has traced the tumultuous publishing history of this most famous of antislavery novels. Among the major issues Claire Parfait addresses in her detailed account are the conditions of female authorship, the structures of copyright, author-publisher relations, agency, and literary economics.
To follow the trail of the book over 150 years is to track the course of American culture, and to read the various editions is to gain insight into the most basic structures, formations, and formulations of literary culture during the period. Parfait interrelates the cultural status of this still controversial novel with its publishing history, and thus also chronicles the changing mood and mores of the nation during the past century and a half. Scholars of Stowe, of American literature and culture, and of publishing history will find this impressive and compelling work invaluable.
The Temple and the Forum: The American Museum and Cultural Authority in Hawthorne, Melville, Stowe, and Whitman
Les Harrison
The rise of the museum as a cultural institution in 19th-century America brought with it many contested notions - of what artifacts merited preservation or display and the role of museums in public life and the cultural marketplace. In "The Temple and the Forum", Les Harrison excavates the shared concerns and practices of 19th-century American museums and the literary productions of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Walt Whitman. The various representational strategies of museums suggested to these authors solutions to problems of literary and political representation. In probing the practices of three of the 19th-century's most significant museums - Charles Wilson Peale's Philadelphia Museum (1785-1843), P. T. Barnum's American Museum (1841-1865), and the United States National Museum at the Smithsonian (1879-present) - Harrison identifies two dominant models in the struggle over what museums should be: the temple, an institution for the projection and protection of official culture, and the forum, its populist, marketplace counterpart. Merging historical research with textual analysis, Harrison examines manifestations of the temple and the forum in the works of these authors and reconnects their works to the larger literary and cultural marketplace in which they circulated. What emerges is a veiled chapter in the history of American culture: the widening of literary and cultural distinctions between legitimate and illegitimate cultural forms, republicanism and democracy, and the literary and the popular - the temple and the forum.
Uncle Tom's Cabin as Visual Culture
Jo-Ann Morgan
By personalizing the experiences of American slaves, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin had a profound effect on public attitudes toward slavery on the eve of the Civil War, but Stowe’s narrative was not the whole story. Jo-Ann Morgan now reveals how prints and paintings of Uncle Tom and other characters in the novel also shaped public perceptions and how this visual culture had its own impact on history.
Through illustrations in various editions of the book, advertisements for stage productions, paintings of favorite scenes, and even sheet music for Tom-inspired songs, Stowe’s work took on a visual as well as a textual existence. Morgan explores the rich visual discourse generated by Uncle Tom’s Cabin within the context of evolving social conditions and political events of nineteenth-century America to show how images associated with the text came to have lives of their own.
Although Uncle Tom is a recognized icon of American culture, this is the first book to concentrate on the visual discourse involving the character, interpreting a period of American sociocultural history that has been neglected by art historians. Morgan shows how these iconic images offered the country a means of both representing and reinventing its slave past. By examining illustrations by Hammatt Billings and George Cruikshank and the work of painters such as Winslow Homer, Eastman Johnson, Henry Ossawa Tanner, and Thomas Satterwhite Noble, she breaks down boundaries between high art and popular culture to demonstrate how these distinctions helped validate the views of elite producers of culture.
Morgan argues that the popularity of Uncle Tom’s Cabin made it dangerous to prevailing attitudes and the institutional structures kept in place by them, as pictures joined words to challenge patriarchy. She shows how subsequent visual strategies were used to coax the subversive potential of Stowe’s work back within accepted boundaries, as imaging of black people was involved in a cultural backlash against decades of abolition propaganda. Pictures of figures once read as sympathetic were redefined into an alternative propaganda to reinforce white supremacy and put limits on African Americans’ access to citizenship after emancipation.
Despite the simultaneous existence of an urban-based, business-class clientele for paintings and a more popular audience for book illustrations, show posters, and sheet music, Morgan shows that representations of blacks tended to reinforce social hierarchies and protect established regimes. Uncle Tom’s Cabin as Visual Culture is a compelling reexamination of an American icon—and a persuasive case study in how representations of African Americans change in response to social and political agendas.
Creationists: Selected Essays, 1993-2006
E.L. Doctorow
E. L. Doctorow is acclaimed internationally for such novels as Ragtime, Billy Bathgate, and The March. Now here are Doctorow’s rich, revelatory essays on the nature of imaginative thought. In Creationists, Doctorow considers creativity in its many forms: from the literary (Melville and Mark Twain) to the comic (Harpo Marx) to the cosmic (Genesis and Einstein). As he wrestles with the subjects that have teased and fired his own imagination, Doctorow affirms the idea that “we know by what we create.”
Just what is Melville doing in Moby-Dick? And how did The Adventures of Tom Sawyer impel Mark Twain to radically rewrite what we know as Huckleberry Finn? Can we ever trust what novelists say about their own work? How could Franz Kafka have written a book called Amerika without ever leaving Europe? In posing such questions, Doctorow grapples with literary creation not as a critic or as a scholar–but as one working writer frankly contemplating the work of another. It’s a perspective that affords him both protean grace and profound insight.
Among the essays collected here are Doctorow’s musings on the very different Spanish Civil War novels of Ernest Hemingway and André Malraux; a candid assessment of Edgar Allan Poe as our “greatest bad writer”; a bracing analysis of the story of Genesis in which God figures as the most complex and riveting character. Whether he is considering how Harpo Marx opened our eyes to surrealism, the haunting photos with which the late German writer W. G. Sebald illustrated his texts, or the innovations of such literary icons as Heinrich von Kleist, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Sinclair Lewis, Doctorow is unfailingly generous, shrewd, attentive, surprising, and precise.
In examining the creative works of different times and disciplines, Doctorow also reveals the source and nature of his own artistry. Rich in aphorism and anecdote, steeped in history and psychology, informed by a lifetime of reading and writing, Creationists opens a magnificent window into one of the great creative minds of our time.
Race, Slavery, and Liberalism in Nineteenth-century American Literature
Arthur Riss
Moving boldly between literary analysis and political theory, contemporary and antebellum US culture, Arthur Riss invites readers to rethink prevailing accounts of the relationship between slavery, liberalism, and literary representation. Situating Nathaniel Hawthorne, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Frederick Douglass at the center of antebellum debates over the person-hood of the slave, this 2006 book examines how a nation dedicated to the proposition that 'all men are created equal' formulates arguments both for and against race-based slavery. This revisionary argument promises to be unsettling for literary critics, political philosophers, historians of US slavery, as well as those interested in the link between literature and human rights.
Civilized Creatures: Urban Animals, Sentimental Culture, and American Literature, 1850-1900
Jennifer Mason
In Civilized Creatures, Jennifer Mason challenges some of our most enduring ideas about how encounters with nonhuman nature shaped American literature and culture. Mason argues that in the second half of the nineteenth century the most powerful influence on Americans' understanding of their affinities with animals was not increasing separation from the pastoral and the wilderness; instead, it was the population's feelings about the ostensibly civilized animals they encountered in their daily lives.
Americans of diverse backgrounds, Mason shows, found it attractive as well as politic to imagine themselves as most closely connected to those creatures who shared humans' aptitude for civilized life. And to the minds of many in this period, national prosperity depended less on periodic exposure to untamed, wild nature than it did on the proper care and keeping of such animals within suburban and urban environments.
Combining literary analysis with cultural histories of equestrianism, petkeeping, and the animal welfare movement, Civilized Creatures offers new readings of works by Susan Warner, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Charles W. Chesnutt. In each case, Mason demonstrates that understanding contemporary relationships between humans and animals is essential for understanding the debates about gender, race, and cultural power enacted in these texts.
Making the 'America of Art': Cultural Nationalism and Nineteenth-Century Women Writers
Naomi Sofer
"Making the "America of Art" demonstrates that beginning in the 1850s, women writers challenged the terms of the Scottish Common Sense philosophy, which had made artistic endeavors acceptable in the new Republic by subordinating aesthetic motivation to moral and educational goals. Harriet Beecher Stowe and Augusta Jane Evans drew on Ruskin to argue for the creation of a religiously based national aesthetic. In the postbellum years Louisa May Alcott, Rebecca Harding Davis, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, and Constance Fenimore Woolson continued the process in a series of writings that revolved around three central areas of concern: the place of the popular in the realm of high art; the role of the genius; and the legacy of the Civil War." Sofer significantly revises the history of 19th-century American women's authorship by detailing the gradual process that produced women writers wholly identified with literary high culture at the century's end.
Uncle Tom Mania: Slavery, Minstrelsy, and Transatlantic Culture in the 1850s
Sarah Meer
Titled after “Tom-Mania,” the name a British newspaper gave to the international sensation attending the 1852 novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin, this study looks anew at the novel and the songs, plays, sketches, translations, and imitations it inspired. In particular, Sarah Meer shows how the theatrical mode of blackface minstrelsy, the slavery question, and America’s emerging cultural identity affected how Uncle Tom’s Cabin was read, discussed, dramatized, merchandised, and politicized here and abroad.
Until Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Meer says, little truly common ground existed on which the United States and Britain could debate slavery. In addition to cutting across class, gender, and national lines, the novel tapped into a huge, preexisting transatlantic appetite for blackface performance. Even as it condemned slavery, however, Uncle Tom’s Cabin was ambiguous about racial equality, and it portrayed blacks in demeaning ways. This gave copycat novels and minstrel stagings leeway to stray from Harriet Beecher Stowe’s intentions. Minstrel-show versions in particular had a huge influence on later incarnations of the Uncle Tom story, converting the character into “a comic, or worse, a proslavery stooge” -a scorned figure in our popular memory.
To look at how and why Uncle Tom’s Cabin “both advocated emancipation and licensed a plethora of racist imitators,” Meer places it in the context of contemporary minstrel sketches, melodramas, songs, jokes, newspaper commentaries, slave narratives, travel writing, proslavery novels, and even Uncle Tom merchandise like china figurines and wallpaper. She goes on to discuss Harriet Beecher Stowe’s travelogue Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands and her second novel, Dred. The publication of each unleashed the political energies of Uncle Tom’s Cabin and its revisions yet again.
Pictorial Victorians: The Inscription of Values in Word and Image
Julia Thomas
The Victorians were image obsessed. The middle decades of the nineteenth century saw an unprecedented growth in the picture industry. Technological advances enabled the Victorians to adorn with images the pages of their books and the walls of their homes. But this was not a wholly visual culture. Pictorial Victorians focuses on two of the most popular mid-nineteenth-century genres-illustration and narrative painting-that blurred the line between the visual and textual.
Illustration negotiated text and image on the printed page, while narrative painting juxtaposed the two media in its formulation of pictorial stories. Author Julia Thomas reassesses mid-nineteenth-century values in the light of this interplay. The dialogue between word and image generates meanings that are intimately related to the Victorians' image of themselves. Illustrations in Victorian publications and the narrative scenes that lined the walls of the Royal Academy reveal the Victorians' ideas about the world in which they lived and their notions of gender, class, and race.
Pictorial Victorians surveys a range of material, from representations of the crinoline, to the illustrations that accompanied Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel Uncle Tom's Cabin and Tennyson's poetry, to paintings of adultery. It demonstrates that the space between text and image is one in which values are both constructed and questioned.
The 'Tragic Mulatta' Revisited: Race and Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century Antislavery Fiction
Eve Allegra Raimon
Since its inception, the United States has been intensely preoccupied with interracialism. The concept is embedded everywhere in our social and political fabric, including our sense of national identity. And yet, in both its quantitative and symbolic forms, interracialism remains an extremely elusive phenomenon, causing policy makers and census boards to wrangle over how to delineate it and, on an emblematic level, stirring intense emotions from fear to fascination.
In The “Tragic Mulatta” Revisited, Eve Allegra Raimon focuses on the mixed-race female slave in literature, arguing that this figure became a symbolic vehicle for explorations of race and nation—both of which were in crisis in the mid-nineteenth century. At this time, judicial, statutory, social, and scientific debates about the meaning of racial difference (and intermixture) coincided with disputes over frontier expansion, which were never merely about land acquisition but also literally about the “complexion” of that frontier. Embodying both northern and southern ideologies, the “amalgamated” mulatta, the author argues, can be viewed as quintessentially American, a precursor to contemporary motifs of “hybrid” and “mestizo” identities.
Where others have focused on the gendered and racially abject position of the “tragic mulatta,” Raimon reconsiders texts by such central antislavery writers as Lydia Maria Child, William Wells Brown, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Harriet Wilson to suggest that the figure is more usefully examined as a way of understanding the volatile and shifting interface of race and national identity in the antebellum period.
The Beecher Sisters
Barbara White
The Beecher sisters - Catharine, Harriet and Isabella - were three of the most prominent women in 19th-century America. Daughters of the famous evangelist Lyman Beecher, they could not follow their father and seven brothers into the ministry. Nonetheless, they carved out pathbreaking careers for themselves. Catharine Beecher founded the Hartford Female Seminary and devoted her life to improving women's education. Harriet Beecher Stowe became world famous as the author of "Uncle Tom's Cabin". Isabella Beecher Hooker was an outspoken advocate for women's rights. This is a joint biography of the sisters, whose lives spanned the full course of the 19th century. The life of Isabella Beecher is examined in particular detail here. Drawing on little-used sources, Barbara White explores Isabella's political development and her interactions with her sisters and with prominent people of the time - from Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton to Mark Twain.
The Grammar of Good Intentions: Race & the Antebellum Culture of Benevolence
Susan Ryan
Susan M. Ryan explores antebellum Americans’ preoccupation with the language and practice of benevolence. Drawing on a variety of cultural and literary texts, she traces how people working and writing within social reform movements—and their outspoken opponents—helped solidify racial and class ideologies that ultimately marginalized even the most "deserving" poor. "The links between race and the relations of benevolence occasioned much soul-searching among antebellum Americans," Ryan explains. "In a period of heated public debate over issues such as slavery, Indian removal, and non-Protestant immigration, the categories of blackness, Indianness, and a generic ‘foreignness’ came to signify, for many whites, need itself."
Ryan puts familiar literary works such as Herman Melville’s The Confidence-Man, Frederick Douglass’s My Bondage and My Freedom, and Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin back into dialogue with a broad range of print materials: the reports of charity societies, African American and Native American newspapers, juvenile fiction, travel writing, cartoons, sermons, and tract literature. In the process, she dispels the myth that authors usually classified as literary were responding to a simple and unquestioned cult of benevolence. Rather, she contends, they were participating in the complex and often rancorous debates occurring within the broader culture over how good intentions should be expressed and enacted.
Ryan’s inquiry into the antebellum culture of benevolence has implications for contemporary U.S. society, resonating especially with recent debates over welfare reform, the politics of compassionate conservatism, and representations of "welfare queens" and violent urban youth. As Ryan writes, "The conversations that this book reconstructs remind us of our ongoing participation in the national ritual of laying claim to good intentions."
The Masochistic Pleasures of Sentimental Literature
Marianne Noble
For generations, critics have noticed in nineteenth-century American women's sentimentality a streak of masochism, but their discussions of it have over-simplified its complex relationship to women's power. Marianne Noble argues that tropes of eroticized domination in sentimental literature must be recognized for what they were: a double-edged sword of both oppression and empowerment. She begins by exploring the cultural forces that came together to create this ideology of desire, particularly Protestant discourses relating suffering to love and middle-class discourses of "true womanhood." She goes on to demonstrate how sentimental literature takes advantage of the expressive power in the convergence of these two discourses to imagine women's romantic desire. Therefore, in sentimental literature, images of eroticized domination are not antithetical to female pleasure but rather can be constitutive of it. The book, however, does not simply celebrate that fact. In readings of Warner's The Wide Wide World, Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, and Dickinson's sentimental poetry, it addresses the complex benefits and costs of nineteenth-century women's literary masochism. Ultimately it shows how these authors both exploited and were shaped by this discursive practice.
Beechers, Stowes, and Yankee Strangers: The Transformation of Florida
John T. Foster Jr. and Sarah Whitmer Foster
Modern Florida--a world of tourists, retirees from the North, and novel agricultural crops--began among a group of Yankee reformers at the end of the Civil War, including Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and her brother, Charles, who lived in Florida between 1867 and 1885. This book tells the story of the group--and their designs for a postwar Florida--with the action, atmosphere, and insight of a good novel.
Arriving in Florida nearly two decades ahead of Henry Flagler, the Beechers found a wild and inaccessible state with small remnants of a slave economy. As part of the work of Reconstruction, they dreamed of making the state a haven for freedmen and progressive northerners unhampered by the rest of the South’s racial divisions. Settling near Tallahassee and Jacksonville, they worked with Florida’s First Lady, Chloe Merrick Reed, to better education, religion, economics, social and racial relationships, and politics, and they were instrumental in the transformation of Jacksonville from a small seaport to a vibrant city.
Despite continuing interest in Harriet Beecher Stowe, her years in Florida have remained obscure; even less is known about Charles Beecher during this period. Using fresh materials that have never been recorded by the Stowe Center (a major repository of Stowe’s works), John and Sarah Foster fill an important gap in the lives of these celebrated reformers and shed new light on Florida’s history during Reconstruction and the Gilded Age.
The Oxford Harriet Beecher Stowe Reader
Joan Hedrick
While best known for the immensely popular and controversial novel Uncle Tom's Cabin, Harriet Beecher Stowe is also the author of an extensive body of additional work on American culture and politics. Playing many roles--journalist, pamphleteer, novelist, preacher, and advisor on domestic affairs--Stowe used the written word as a vehicle for religious, social, and political commentaries, often leavening them with entertainment in order to reach a broad audience. She had a profound effect on American culture, not because her ideas were unique, but because they were common. What made her so radical was that she insisted on putting her ideas into action.
The Oxford Harriet Beecher Stowe Reader offers a focused collection of Stowe's writings from the 1830s through the 1860s. Illustrating her broad range, rhetorical strategies, and cultural designs on the world, it is ideal for courses in nineteenth-century American literature, women's literature, and American history. The volume collects those selections best suited for classroom use, reprinting many pieces here for the first time. Editor Joan D. Hedrick provides a substantial introduction that assesses Stowe's vital impact on nineteenth-century American literature, politics, and culture. The readings are divided into three sections: Early Sketches, Antislavery Writings, and Domestic Culture and Politics. Early Sketches presents the finest writing of Stowe's literary apprenticeship. Antislavery Writings includes Uncle Tom's Cabin in its entirety, placing it in the context of Stowe's considerable and often-overlooked body of other antislavery writings. This section also includes a generous selection from A Key To Uncle Tom's Cabin, a companion volume to the novel. Domestic Culture and Politics shows the scope of Stowe's thinking on the Victorian home, for which she was a major propagandist. The inclusion here of "The True Story of Lady Byron's Life," an exposé of male debauchery and incest at the core of a nineteenth-century home, represents Stowe's willingness to tackle the most challenging political and social issues of her time.
Home Fronts: Domesticity and Its Critics in the Antebellum United States
Lora Romero
Unlike studies of nineteenth-century culture that perpetuate a dichotomy of a public, male world set against a private, female world, Lora Romero’s Home Fronts shows the many, nuanced, and sometimes contradictory cultural planes on which struggles for authority unfolded in antebellum America.
Romero remaps the literary landscape of the last century by looking at the operations of domesticity on the frontier as well as within the middle-class home and by reconsidering such crucial (if sometimes unexpected) sites for the workings of domesticity as social reform movements, African-American activism, and homosocial high culture. In the process, she indicts theories of the nineteenth century based on binarisms and rigidity while challenging models of power and resistance based on the idea that "culture" has the capacity to either free or enslave. Through readings of James Fenimore Cooper, Catherine Beecher, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Maria Stewart, and Nathaniel Hawthorne, Romero shows how the politics of culture reside in local formulations rather than in essential and ineluctable political structures.
Weapons of Women Writers: Bertha von Suttner's Die Waffen nieder as Political Literature in the Tradition of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin
Regina Braker
This study explores the claim that Bertha von Suttner's anti-war novel Die Waffen nieder was the «Uncle Tom's Cabin of the peace movement,» which originated in a comment from a letter to Suttner from Leo Tolstoy. The two novels are compared on the basis of Tolstoy's theory of art, with focus on the didactic purpose and moral message of each novel. While Uncle Tom's Cabin is a work of moral suasion with an unabashed appeal to feeling, the analysis of militarism in Die Waffen nieder differs in scope and form and in its self-conscious use of sentimentality as a convention, even as its critique of social and political institutions is equally substantial.
Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Life
Joan Hedrick
"Up to this year I have always felt that I had no particular call to meddle with this subject....But I feel now that the time is come when even a woman or a child who can speak a word for freedom and humanity is bound to speak." Thus did Harriet Beecher Stowe announce her decision to begin work on what would become one of the most influential novels ever written. The subject she had hesitated to "meddle with" was slavery, and the novel, of course, was Uncle Tom's Cabin. Still debated today for its portrayal of African Americans and its unresolved place in the literary canon, Stowe's best-known work was first published in weekly installments from June 5, 1851 to April 1, 1852. It caused such a stir in both the North and South, and even in Great Britain, that when Stowe met President Lincoln in 1862 he is said to have greeted her with the words, "So you are the little woman who wrote the book that created this great war!"
In this landmark book, the first full-scale biography of Harriet Beecher Stowe in over fifty years, Joan D. Hedrick tells the absorbing story of this gifted, complex, and contradictory woman. Hedrick takes readers into the multilayered world of nineteenth century morals and mores, exploring the influence of then-popular ideas of "true womanhood" on Stowe's upbringing as a member of the outspoken Beecher clan, and her eventful life as a writer and shaper of public opinion who was also a mother of seven. It offers a lively record of the flourishing parlor societies that launched and sustained Stowe throughout the 44 years of her career, and the harsh physical realities that governed so many women's lives. The epidemics, high infant mortality, and often disastrous medical practices of the day are portrayed in moving detail, against the backdrop of western expansion, and the great social upheaval accompanying the abolitionist movement and the entry of women into public life.
Here are Stowe's public triumphs, both before and after the Civil War, and the private tragedies that included the death of her adored eighteen month old son, the drowning of another son, and the alcohol and morphine addictions of two of her other children. The daughter, sister, and wife of prominent ministers, Stowe channeled her anguish and her ambition into a socially acceptable anger on behalf of others, transforming her private experience into powerful narratives that moved a nation.
Magisterial in its breadth and rich in detail, this definitive portrait explores the full measure of Harriet Beecher Stowe's life, and her contribution to American literature. Perceptive and engaging, it illuminates the career of a major writer during the transition of literature from an amateur pastime to a profession, and offers a fascinating look at the pains, pleasures, and accomplishments of women's lives in the last century.
Message, Messenger, and Response: Puritan Forms and Cultural Reformation in Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin
Gladys Sherman Lewis
Harriet Beecher Stowe caused social change with her literary strategies formed by Puritanism and sentimentality. This book analyzes the design she created with Puritan genres, voice, and audience in Uncle Tom's Cabin to provide a methodology for social change, demonstrating the power of sermon and narrative in tension in American literary history.
Domestic Individualism: Imagining Self in Nineteenth-Century America
Gillian Brown
Gillian Brown's book probes the key relationship between domestic ideology and formulations of the self in nineteenth-century America. Arguing that domesticity institutes gender, class, and racial distinctions that govern masculine as well as feminine identity, Brown brilliantly alters, for literary critics, feminists, and cultural historians, the critical perspective from which nineteenth-century American literature and culture have been viewed.
In this study of the domestic constitution of individualism, Brown traces how the values of interiority, order, privacy, and enclosure associated with the American home come to define selfhood in general. By analyzing writings by Stowe, Hawthorne, Melville, Fern, and Gilman, and by examining other contemporary cultural modes—abolitionism, consumerism, architecture, interior decorating, motherhood, mesmerism, hysteria, and agoraphobia—she reconfigures the parameters of both domesticity and the patterns of self it fashions. Unfolding a representational history of the domestic, Brown's work offers striking new readings of the literary texts as well as of the cultural contexts that they embody.
Harriet Beecher Stowe
John Adams
Devoted to critical interpretation and discussion of an author's work, each study takes account of major literary trends and important scholarly contributions and provides new critical insights with an original point of view. An Authors Series volume addresses readers ranging from advanced high school students to university professors. The book suggests to the informed reader new ways of considering a writer's work. A reader new to the work under examination will, after reading the Authors Series, be compelled to turn to the originals, bringing to the reading a basic knowledge and fresh critical perspectives.
The Limits of Sisterhood: The Beecher Sisters on Women's Rights and Woman's Sphere
Anne Margolis, Mary Kelley, and Jeanne Boydston
In a century almost continually at odds with the proper place of females, Catherine Esther Beecher, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Isabella Beecher Hooker shared a commitment to women's power. Although they did not always agree on the nature of that power, each in her own way--Catherine as educator and author of advice literature; Harriet as author of novels, tales, and sketches; and Isabella as a women's rights advocate--devoted much of her adult life to elevating women's status and expanding women's influence.
Black and White Women of the Old South: The Peculiar Sisterhood in American Literature
Minrose Gwin
Considering fictional characters and autobiographical reflections of female experience, Minrose C. Gwin explores the volatile, often violent connection between black and white woman of the Old South. She shows that their relationship in American literature offers a paradigm of the Southern racial experience-its antipathy and guilt on the one hand, its very real bonding through common suffering on the other. Gwin's study encompasses a wide range of books, including abolitionist and pro slavery fiction of the mid-nineteenth century, women's slave narratives and journals, and modern fictional treatments of Southern slavery by Faulkner, Cather, and Margaret Walker. She analyzes such diverse works as Mary Chestnut's Civil War and Harriet Jacob's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Her pioneering interpetations enable us to understand the Southern past more fully, to identify new critical relationships between works of literature, and to discern fresh implications of female experience.
The Pearl of Orr's Island
Bruce Kirkham
This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1896 edition. Excerpt: ... CHAPTER Vin THE SEEN AND THE UNSEEN Life on any shore is a dull affair, -- ever degenerating into commonplace; and this may account for the eagerness with which even a great calamity is sometimes accepted in a neighborhood, as affording wherewithal to stir the deeper feelings of our nature. Thus, though Mrs. Kittridge was by no means a hard-hearted woman, and would not for the world have had a ship wrecked on her particular account, yet since a ship had been wrecked and a body floated ashore at her very door, as it were, it afforded her no inconsiderable satisfaction to dwell on the details and to arrange for the funeral. It was something to talk about and to think of, and likely to furnish subject-matter for talk for years to come when she should go out to tea with any of her acquaintances who lived at Middle Bay, or Maquoit, or Harpswell Neck. For although in those days, -- the number of light-houses being much smaller than it is now, -- it was no uncommon thing for ships to be driven on shore in storms, yet this incident had undeniably more that was stirring and romantic in it than any within the memory of any tea-table gossip in the vicinity. Mrs. Kittridge, therefore, looked forward to the funeral services on Sunday afternoon as to a species of solemn fete, which imparted a sort of consequence to her dwelling and herself. Notice of it was to be given out in "meeting" after service, and she might expect both keeping-room and kitchen to be full. Mrs. Pennel had offered to do her share of Christian and neighborly kindness, in taking home to her own dwelling the little boy. In fact, it became necessary to do so in order to appease the feelings of the little Mara, who clung to the new acquisition with most devoted fondness, and wept...
Harriet Beecher Stowe and American Literature
Ellen Moers
Harriet Beecher Stowe is best known for her novel Uncle Tom's Cabin, which played a significant role in accelerating the movement to abolish slavery in the United States.
Harriet and the Runaway Book: The Story of Harriet Beecher Stowe and Uncle Tom's Cabin
Johanna Johnston and Ronald Himaler
A biography of the woman who wrote Uncle Tom's Cabin, stressing the experiences and impressions which caused her to write the famous book denouncing slavery.
The Building of Uncle Tom's Cabin
Bruce Kirkham
In a careful reconstruction of the making of the novel, Professor Kirkham investigates its sources in political occurrences during the anti-slavery movement, social and family milieu, and publications of the early nineteenth century. Anecdotes, themes and styles through Stowe's letters and earlier writings provide further insight.
Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Biography
Noel Gerson
“So this is the little lady who made this big war,” marvelled Abraham Lincoln when he first met Harriet Beecher Stowe.
Noel Gerson explores the life of this fascinating woman who literally changed the course of American history with her book Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
Harriet Beecher Stowe reveals a towering literary figure who was also a remarkable woman, a crusading feminist, and a woman who led a life more dramatic than anything she wrote.
In an age when women were usually confined to the kitchen, the bedroom, and the parlour, Harriet Beecher Stowe argued emancipation with President Lincoln, had an extraordinary woman-to-woman relationship with Queen Victoria, and was regarded by Emile Zola as a comrade-in-arms in their separate crusades for a better world.
Her super-abundant energy and refreshing humour enabled her to combine the duties of a devoted wife and mother of five with a renowned literary career and to become in the process one of the greatest celebrities of the nineteenth century.
‘Harriet Beecher Stowe’ is an impressive biography of a literary giant who changed the course of history forever.
Uncle Tom's Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly
Kenneth Lynn
Uncle Tom's Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly, is an anti-slavery novel by American author Harriet Beecher Stowe. Published in 1852, the novel "helped lay the groundwork for the Civil War", according to Will Kaufman.
Stowe, a Connecticut-born teacher at the Hartford Female Seminary and an active abolitionist, featured the character of Uncle Tom, a long-suffering black slave around whom the stories of other characters revolve. The sentimental novel depicts the reality of slavery while also asserting that Christian love can overcome something as destructive as enslavement of fellow human beings.
Uncle Tom's Cabin was the best-selling novel of the 19th century and the second best-selling book of that century, following the Bible. It is credited with helping fuel the abolitionist cause in the 1850s. In the first year after it was published, 300,000 copies of the book were sold in the United States; one million copies were sold in Great Britain. In 1855, three years after it was published, it was called "the most popular novel of our day." The impact attributed to the book is great, reinforced by a story that when Abraham Lincoln met Stowe at the start of the Civil War, Lincoln declared, "So this is the little lady who started this great war." The quote is apocryphal; it did not appear in print until 1896, and it has been argued that "The long-term durability of Lincoln's greeting as an anecdote in literary studies and Stowe scholarship can perhaps be explained in part by the desire among many contemporary intellectuals ... to affirm the role of literature as an agent of social change."
The book and the plays it inspired helped popularize a number of stereotypes about black people. These include the affectionate, dark-skinned "mammy"; the "pickaninny" stereotype of black children; and the "Uncle Tom", or dutiful, long-suffering servant faithful to his white master or mistress. In recent years, the negative associations with Uncle Tom's Cabin have, to an extent, overshadowed the historical impact of the book as a "vital antislavery tool."
Elif S. Armbruster
Domestic Biographies: Stowe, Howells, James, and Wharton at Home presents comparative domestic biographies of four American Realist writers: Harriet Beecher Stowe, William Dean Howells, Henry James, and Edith Wharton. Drawing upon extensive primary sources to reconstruct the authors’ private lives, Domestic Biographies illuminates how they lived when no one was looking. In particular this book examines how the authors worked and wrote at home and how their home life in turn made its way into their novels and non-fiction. Domestic Biographies offers an innovative and exciting architectural and domestic lens through which to study the lives and literature of America’s best-known Realists.
Mightier Than the Sword: Uncle Tom's Cabin and the Battle for America
David S. Reynolds
In this wide-ranging, brilliantly researched work, David S. Reynolds traces the factors that made Uncle Tom’s Cabin the most influential novel ever written by an American. Upon its 1852 publication, the novel’s vivid depiction of slavery polarized its American readership, ultimately widening the rift that led to the Civil War. Reynolds also charts the novel’s afterlife―including its adaptation into plays, films, and consumer goods―revealing its lasting impact on American entertainment, advertising, and race relations
Novel Bondage: Slavery, Marriage, and Freedom in Nineteenth-Century America
Tess Chakkalakal
Novel Bondage unravels the interconnections between marriage, slavery, and freedom through renewed readings of canonical nineteenth-century novels and short stories by black and white authors. Situating close readings of fiction alongside archival material concerning the actual marriages of authors such as Lydia Maria Child, Harriet Beecher Stowe, William Wells Brown, and Frank J. Webb, Chakkalakal examines how these early novels established literary conventions for describing the domestic lives of American slaves in describing their aspirations for personal and civic freedom. Exploring this theme in post-Civil War works by Frances E.W. Harper and Charles Chesnutt, she further reveals how the slave-marriage plot served as a fictional model for reforming marriage laws. Chakkalakal invites readers to rethink the "marital work" of nineteenth-century fiction and the historical role it played in shaping our understanding of the literary and political meaning of marriage, then and now.
Republic of Words: The Atlantic Monthly and Its Writers, 1857-1925
Susan Goodman
A record of Atlantic Monthly authors reads like a Who’s Who of American literature. The magazine’s stable of contributors included Mark Twain, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Frederick Douglass, Louisa May Alcott, Sarah Orne Jewett, Kate Chopin, Henry Adams, Frank Norris, Jack London, Henry James, Owen Wister, Robert Frost, and many others.
In Republic of Words, Susan Goodman brilliantly captures this emerging culture of arts, ideas, science, and literature of an America in its adolescence, as filtered through the intersecting lives and words of the best and brightest writers of the day. Through this lens, Goodman examines the life of the magazine from its emergence in 1857 through the 1920s.
The Politics of Anxiety in Nineteenth-Century American Literature
Justine S. Murison
For much of the nineteenth century, the nervous system was a medical mystery, inspiring scientific studies and exciting great public interest. Because of this widespread fascination, the nerves came to explain the means by which mind and body related to each other. By the 1830s, the nervous system helped Americans express the consequences on the body, and for society, of major historical changes. Literary writers, including Nathaniel Hawthorne and Harriet Beecher Stowe, used the nerves as a metaphor to re-imagine the role of the self amidst political, social and religious tumults, including debates about slavery and the revivals of the Second Great Awakening. Representing the 'romance' of the nervous system and its cultural impact thoughtfully and, at times, critically, the fictional experiments of this century helped construct and explore a neurological vision of the body and mind. Murison explains the impact of neurological medicine on nineteenth-century literature and culture.
Uncle Tom's Cabin and the Reading Revolution: Race, Literacy, Childhood, and Fiction, 1851-1911
Barbara Hochman
"Uncle Tom's Cabin" and the Reading Revolution explores a transformation in the cultural meaning of Stowe's influential book by addressing changes in reading practices and a shift in widely shared cultural assumptions. These changes reshaped interpretive conventions and generated new meanings for Stowe's text in the wake of the Civil War.
During the 1850s, men, women, and children avidly devoured Stowe's novel. White adults wept and could not put the book down, neglecting work and other obligations to complete it. African Americans both celebrated and denounced the book. By the 1890s, readers understood Uncle Tom's Cabin in new ways. Prefaces and retrospectives celebrated Stowe's novel as a historical event that led directly to emancipation and national unity. Commentaries played down the evangelical and polemical messages of the book.
Illustrations and children's editions projected images of entertaining and devoted servants into an open-ended future. In the course of the 1890s, Uncle Tom's Cabin became both a more viciously racialized book than it had been and a less compelling one. White readers no longer consumed the book at one sitting; Uncle Tom's Cabin was now more widely known than read. However, in the growing silence surrounding slavery at the turn of the century, Stowe's book became an increasingly important source of ideas, facts, and images that the children of ex-slaves and other free-black readers could use to make sense of their position in U.S. culture.
A Home Elsewhere: Reading African American Classics in the Age of Obama
Robert B. Stepto
In this series of interlocking essays, which had their start as lectures inspired by the presidency of Barack Obama, Robert Burns Stepto sets canonical works of African American literature in conversation with Obama’s Dreams from My Father. The elegant readings that result shed surprising light on unexamined angles of works ranging from Frederick Douglass’s Narrative to W. E. B. Du Bois’s Souls of Black Folk to Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon.
Stepto draws our attention to the concerns that recur in the books he takes up: how protagonists raise themselves, often without one or both parents; how black boys invent black manhood, often with no models before them; how protagonists seek and find a home elsewhere; and how they create personalities that can deal with the pain of abandonment. These are age-old themes in African American literature that, Stepto shows, gain a special poignancy and importance because our president has lived through these situations and circumstances and has written about them in a way that refreshes our understanding of the whole of African American literature.
Stepto amplifies these themes in four additional essays, which investigate Douglass’s correspondence with Harriet Beecher Stowe; Willard Savoy’s novel Alien Land and its interracial protagonist; the writer’s understanding of the reader in African American literature; and Stepto’s account of his own schoolhouse lessons, with their echoes of Douglass’ and Obama’s experiences.
Charles Testut's Le Vieux Salomon: Race, Religion, Socialism, and Freemasonry
Sheri Lyn Abel
Through the study of Charles Testut's Le Vieux Salomon, a nineteenth-century southern Francophone antislavery novel, this book encourages a reassessment of the southern experience and of the canon of southern literature. Abel argues that Testut's distinctiveness lies in his French intellectual heritage and in his awareness of the rich historical and cultural links between the ethnic legacies of Louisiana and the French Caribbean. Le Vieux Salomon is marked by a sense of place through the author's identification with two regions colonized by the French and which are symbolically represented in the bodies of his black protagonists. In this mulatto couple converge the history and memory of French colonization in the Antilles and Louisiana.
Exploring Testut's influences, from Masonic symbolism and principles through nineteenth-century French socialist thought, the book shows how Testut endeavors, through his construction of raced and gendered identity in his protagonists, to eradicate the association of blackness with inferiority. It finishes with a comparative study between Le Vieux Salomon and Harriett Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin to demonstrate how Testut's perspective as a French southern local writer sets him apart from Stowe's Northern view, further emphasizing Testut's contribution to the formulation of a southern cultural and literary identity.
Owning Up: Privacy, Property, and Belonging in U. S. Women's Life Writing
Katherine Adams
Owning Up provides a new model for interpreting the U.S. discourse on privacy. Focusing on the formative period of the nineteenth century, Adams shows that conceptions of privacy became meaningful only when posed in opposition to the encroaching forces of market capitalism and commodification. Even as Americans came to regard privacy as a natural right and to identify it with sacred ideals of democratic freedom, they also learned to think of it as fragile and under threat. Owning Up argues that narratives of violation and dispossession played a fundamental role in the emergence of U.S. privacy discourse and in the influence this discourse continues to exert within U.S. culture.
Using biographical and autobiographical writing by and about women writers including Sojourner Truth, Margaret Fuller, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Elizabeth Keckley, and Louisa May Alcott, Adams traces the figure of imperiled privacy across five decades. Where previous studies of early American privacy have focused on white femininity and middle-class domesticity as defining features, Owning Up contends that privacy is an empty category. Without a fixed content of its own, privacy acquires meaning only by being articulated-and constantly re-articulated-against threats of invasion and loss. Chapters look at how such narratives operate within particular political and economic contexts, including antebellum reform, racial reconstruction, free labor ideology, and laissez faire social Darwinism. The analysis concludes at the end of the century with calls for legislation to protect the individual's "right to be let alone," a culminating moment in the discourse of threatened privacy that informs the American sense of self to this day.
Shades of Green: Visions of Nature in the Literature of American Slavery
Ian Finseth
Shades of Green offers a creative reimagining of early and antebellum American literary culture by exploring the complex web of relationships linking racial thought to natural science and natural imagery. The book charts a dynamic shift in both polemical and imaginative literature during the century before the Civil War, as scientific, artistic, and spiritual vocabularies regarding “nature;” became increasingly important for authors seeking to mobilize public opinion against slavery or to redefine racial identity. Finseth argues that these vocabularies both liberated and constrained antislavery philosophy and, more broadly, that our understanding of race in early American literature must take the natural world into account. In doing this, Finseth fuses a cultural history of the period with fresh readings of such major figures as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Frederick Douglass.
Drawing on a range of theoretical and disciplinary perspectives, including aesthetics, anthropology, phenomenology, and ecocriticism, Shades of Green demonstrates the agility with which human thought about the natural and the racial leapt across formal epistemological, professional, and artistic boundaries. In this innovative account, the politics of race and slavery are shown to have been deeply intertwined with putatively apolitical cultural understandings of the natural world. The book will be of value to scholars in a variety of disciplines, including American studies, African American literary history, and environmental philosophy.
Stowe in Her Own Time: A Biographical Chronicle of Her Life, Drawn from Recollections, Interviews, and Memoirs by Family, Friends, and Associates
Susan Belasco
One of the first celebrity authors, Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-1896) became famous almost overnight when "Uncle Tom's Cabin" - which sold more than 300,000 copies in its first year of publication - appeared in 1852. Known by virtually all famous writers in the United States and many in England and regarded by many women writers as a role model because of her influence in the literary marketplace, Stowe herself was the subject of many books, articles, essays, and poems during her lifetime. This volume brings together for the first time a range of primary materials about Stowe's private and public life written by family members, friends, and fellow writers who knew or were influenced by her before and after "Uncle Tom's Cabin" catapulted her to fame. Included are periodical articles by Fanny Fern and Charles Dudley Warner; biographical essays by Sarah Josepha Hale and Rose Terry Cooke; letters by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and Harriet Jacobs; recollections by Frederick Douglass, Annie Adams Fields, Isabella Beecher Hooker, and Charles Beecher; and poems by Paul Laurence Dunbar and John Greenleaf Whittier. An introduction at the beginning of each essay connects it to its historical and cultural context, explanatory notes provide information about people and places, and the book includes a detailed introduction and a chronology of Stowe's life. The thirty-eight recollections gathered in "Stowe in Her Own Time" form a biographical narrative designed to provide several perspectives on the famous author, sometimes in conflict and sometimes in agreement but always perceptive. The figure who emerges from this insightful, analytical collection is far more complex than the image she helped construct in her lifetime.
Loves of Harriet Beecher Stowe
Philip McFarland
“So you’re the little lady who started the war,” Abraham Lincoln is rumored to have said when he met the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin on the eve of the Emancipation Proclamation. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s groundbreaking novel forced an ambivalent North to confront the atrocities of slavery, yet her accomplishment was just one of many of the Beechers, the most eminent American family of the nineteenth century. In this intimate account, historian Philip McFarland follows the Beecher clan to the frontier boom town of Cincinnati, where Harriet’s glimpses of slavery across the Kentucky border moved her to pen Uncle Tom’s Cabin. We meet Harriet’s foremost loves: her father Lyman, her husband Calvin, and her brother, Henry Ward Beecher, the most famous preacher of his time whose trial for adultery riveted the nation. And as McFarland traces the arc of Harriet’s literary career from her hardscrabble beginnings as a freelancer to her ascendancy as the most renowned writer of the age, he crafts her family’s story into a detailed rendering of mid-nineteenth-century America in the midst of social and demographic explosions that are still being felt to this day.
Private Sphere to World Stage from Austen to Eliot
Elizabeth Sabiston
Emily Dickinson's poem, 'This is my letter to the World/ That never wrote to Me --', opens the Introduction, which focuses on the near-anonymity of nineteenth-century women novelists. Close readings of works by five British novelists—Jane Austen, Charlotte and Emily Brontë, Elizabeth Gaskell, and George Eliot—offer persuasive accounts of the ways in which women used stealth tactics to outmaneuver their detractors. Chapters examine the 'hidden manifesto' in Austen's works, whose imaginative heroines defend women's writing; the lasting impact of Jane Eyre, with its modest heroine who takes up the pen to tell her own story, even on male writers outside the English tradition; Cathy's testament as the 'ghost-text' of Wuthering Heights; and the shifting gender roles in Daniel Deronda, with its silenced heroine and androgynous hero. Though the focus is on British novelists, Sabiston's discussion of the Anglo-American connections in the factory novels of Elizabeth Gaskell and the slavery writings of Harriet Beecher Stowe has particular relevance for its demonstration of how the move from the private to the public sphere enables and even compels the blurring of national and ethnic boundaries. What emerges is a compelling argument for the relevance of these novelists to the emergence in our own time of hitherto-silenced female voices around the globe.
Slavery on Trial: Law, Abolitionism, and Print Culture
Jeannine Marie DeLombard
America's legal consciousness was high during the era that saw the imprisonment of abolitionist editor William Lloyd Garrison, the execution of slave revolutionary Nat Turner, and the hangings of John Brown and his Harpers Ferry co-conspirators. Jeannine Marie DeLombard examines how debates over slavery in the three decades before the Civil War employed legal language to "try" the case for slavery in the court of public opinion via popular print media.
Discussing autobiographies by Frederick Douglass, a scandal narrative about Sojourner Truth, an abolitionist speech by Henry David Thoreau, sentimental fiction by Harriet Beecher Stowe, and a proslavery novel by William MacCreary Burwell, DeLombard argues that American literature of the era cannot be fully understood without an appreciation for the slavery debate in the courts and in print. Combining legal, literary, and book history approaches, Slavery on Trial provides a refreshing alternative to the official perspectives offered by the nation's founding documents, legal treatises, statutes, and judicial decisions. DeLombard invites us to view the intersection of slavery and law as so many antebellum Americans did--through the lens of popular print culture.
The Cambridge Introduction to Harriet Beecher Stowe
Sarah Robbins
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.
The Publishing History of Uncle Tom's Cabin, 1852-2002
Claire Parfait
Uncle Tom's Cabin continues to provoke impassioned discussions among scholars; to serve as the inspiration for theater, film, and dance; and to be the locus of much heated debate surrounding race relations in the United States. It is also one of the most remarkable print-based texts in U.S. publishing history. And yet, until now, no book-length study has traced the tumultuous publishing history of this most famous of antislavery novels. Among the major issues Claire Parfait addresses in her detailed account are the conditions of female authorship, the structures of copyright, author-publisher relations, agency, and literary economics.
To follow the trail of the book over 150 years is to track the course of American culture, and to read the various editions is to gain insight into the most basic structures, formations, and formulations of literary culture during the period. Parfait interrelates the cultural status of this still controversial novel with its publishing history, and thus also chronicles the changing mood and mores of the nation during the past century and a half. Scholars of Stowe, of American literature and culture, and of publishing history will find this impressive and compelling work invaluable.
The Temple and the Forum: The American Museum and Cultural Authority in Hawthorne, Melville, Stowe, and Whitman
Les Harrison
The rise of the museum as a cultural institution in 19th-century America brought with it many contested notions - of what artifacts merited preservation or display and the role of museums in public life and the cultural marketplace. In "The Temple and the Forum", Les Harrison excavates the shared concerns and practices of 19th-century American museums and the literary productions of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Walt Whitman. The various representational strategies of museums suggested to these authors solutions to problems of literary and political representation. In probing the practices of three of the 19th-century's most significant museums - Charles Wilson Peale's Philadelphia Museum (1785-1843), P. T. Barnum's American Museum (1841-1865), and the United States National Museum at the Smithsonian (1879-present) - Harrison identifies two dominant models in the struggle over what museums should be: the temple, an institution for the projection and protection of official culture, and the forum, its populist, marketplace counterpart. Merging historical research with textual analysis, Harrison examines manifestations of the temple and the forum in the works of these authors and reconnects their works to the larger literary and cultural marketplace in which they circulated. What emerges is a veiled chapter in the history of American culture: the widening of literary and cultural distinctions between legitimate and illegitimate cultural forms, republicanism and democracy, and the literary and the popular - the temple and the forum.
Uncle Tom's Cabin as Visual Culture
Jo-Ann Morgan
By personalizing the experiences of American slaves, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin had a profound effect on public attitudes toward slavery on the eve of the Civil War, but Stowe’s narrative was not the whole story. Jo-Ann Morgan now reveals how prints and paintings of Uncle Tom and other characters in the novel also shaped public perceptions and how this visual culture had its own impact on history.
Through illustrations in various editions of the book, advertisements for stage productions, paintings of favorite scenes, and even sheet music for Tom-inspired songs, Stowe’s work took on a visual as well as a textual existence. Morgan explores the rich visual discourse generated by Uncle Tom’s Cabin within the context of evolving social conditions and political events of nineteenth-century America to show how images associated with the text came to have lives of their own.
Although Uncle Tom is a recognized icon of American culture, this is the first book to concentrate on the visual discourse involving the character, interpreting a period of American sociocultural history that has been neglected by art historians. Morgan shows how these iconic images offered the country a means of both representing and reinventing its slave past. By examining illustrations by Hammatt Billings and George Cruikshank and the work of painters such as Winslow Homer, Eastman Johnson, Henry Ossawa Tanner, and Thomas Satterwhite Noble, she breaks down boundaries between high art and popular culture to demonstrate how these distinctions helped validate the views of elite producers of culture.
Morgan argues that the popularity of Uncle Tom’s Cabin made it dangerous to prevailing attitudes and the institutional structures kept in place by them, as pictures joined words to challenge patriarchy. She shows how subsequent visual strategies were used to coax the subversive potential of Stowe’s work back within accepted boundaries, as imaging of black people was involved in a cultural backlash against decades of abolition propaganda. Pictures of figures once read as sympathetic were redefined into an alternative propaganda to reinforce white supremacy and put limits on African Americans’ access to citizenship after emancipation.
Despite the simultaneous existence of an urban-based, business-class clientele for paintings and a more popular audience for book illustrations, show posters, and sheet music, Morgan shows that representations of blacks tended to reinforce social hierarchies and protect established regimes. Uncle Tom’s Cabin as Visual Culture is a compelling reexamination of an American icon—and a persuasive case study in how representations of African Americans change in response to social and political agendas.
Creationists: Selected Essays, 1993-2006
E.L. Doctorow
E. L. Doctorow is acclaimed internationally for such novels as Ragtime, Billy Bathgate, and The March. Now here are Doctorow’s rich, revelatory essays on the nature of imaginative thought. In Creationists, Doctorow considers creativity in its many forms: from the literary (Melville and Mark Twain) to the comic (Harpo Marx) to the cosmic (Genesis and Einstein). As he wrestles with the subjects that have teased and fired his own imagination, Doctorow affirms the idea that “we know by what we create.”
Just what is Melville doing in Moby-Dick? And how did The Adventures of Tom Sawyer impel Mark Twain to radically rewrite what we know as Huckleberry Finn? Can we ever trust what novelists say about their own work? How could Franz Kafka have written a book called Amerika without ever leaving Europe? In posing such questions, Doctorow grapples with literary creation not as a critic or as a scholar–but as one working writer frankly contemplating the work of another. It’s a perspective that affords him both protean grace and profound insight.
Among the essays collected here are Doctorow’s musings on the very different Spanish Civil War novels of Ernest Hemingway and André Malraux; a candid assessment of Edgar Allan Poe as our “greatest bad writer”; a bracing analysis of the story of Genesis in which God figures as the most complex and riveting character. Whether he is considering how Harpo Marx opened our eyes to surrealism, the haunting photos with which the late German writer W. G. Sebald illustrated his texts, or the innovations of such literary icons as Heinrich von Kleist, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Sinclair Lewis, Doctorow is unfailingly generous, shrewd, attentive, surprising, and precise.
In examining the creative works of different times and disciplines, Doctorow also reveals the source and nature of his own artistry. Rich in aphorism and anecdote, steeped in history and psychology, informed by a lifetime of reading and writing, Creationists opens a magnificent window into one of the great creative minds of our time.
Race, Slavery, and Liberalism in Nineteenth-century American Literature
Arthur Riss
Moving boldly between literary analysis and political theory, contemporary and antebellum US culture, Arthur Riss invites readers to rethink prevailing accounts of the relationship between slavery, liberalism, and literary representation. Situating Nathaniel Hawthorne, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Frederick Douglass at the center of antebellum debates over the person-hood of the slave, this 2006 book examines how a nation dedicated to the proposition that 'all men are created equal' formulates arguments both for and against race-based slavery. This revisionary argument promises to be unsettling for literary critics, political philosophers, historians of US slavery, as well as those interested in the link between literature and human rights.
Civilized Creatures: Urban Animals, Sentimental Culture, and American Literature, 1850-1900
Jennifer Mason
In Civilized Creatures, Jennifer Mason challenges some of our most enduring ideas about how encounters with nonhuman nature shaped American literature and culture. Mason argues that in the second half of the nineteenth century the most powerful influence on Americans' understanding of their affinities with animals was not increasing separation from the pastoral and the wilderness; instead, it was the population's feelings about the ostensibly civilized animals they encountered in their daily lives.
Americans of diverse backgrounds, Mason shows, found it attractive as well as politic to imagine themselves as most closely connected to those creatures who shared humans' aptitude for civilized life. And to the minds of many in this period, national prosperity depended less on periodic exposure to untamed, wild nature than it did on the proper care and keeping of such animals within suburban and urban environments.
Combining literary analysis with cultural histories of equestrianism, petkeeping, and the animal welfare movement, Civilized Creatures offers new readings of works by Susan Warner, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Charles W. Chesnutt. In each case, Mason demonstrates that understanding contemporary relationships between humans and animals is essential for understanding the debates about gender, race, and cultural power enacted in these texts.
Making the 'America of Art': Cultural Nationalism and Nineteenth-Century Women Writers
Naomi Sofer
"Making the "America of Art" demonstrates that beginning in the 1850s, women writers challenged the terms of the Scottish Common Sense philosophy, which had made artistic endeavors acceptable in the new Republic by subordinating aesthetic motivation to moral and educational goals. Harriet Beecher Stowe and Augusta Jane Evans drew on Ruskin to argue for the creation of a religiously based national aesthetic. In the postbellum years Louisa May Alcott, Rebecca Harding Davis, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, and Constance Fenimore Woolson continued the process in a series of writings that revolved around three central areas of concern: the place of the popular in the realm of high art; the role of the genius; and the legacy of the Civil War." Sofer significantly revises the history of 19th-century American women's authorship by detailing the gradual process that produced women writers wholly identified with literary high culture at the century's end.
Uncle Tom Mania: Slavery, Minstrelsy, and Transatlantic Culture in the 1850s
Sarah Meer
Titled after “Tom-Mania,” the name a British newspaper gave to the international sensation attending the 1852 novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin, this study looks anew at the novel and the songs, plays, sketches, translations, and imitations it inspired. In particular, Sarah Meer shows how the theatrical mode of blackface minstrelsy, the slavery question, and America’s emerging cultural identity affected how Uncle Tom’s Cabin was read, discussed, dramatized, merchandised, and politicized here and abroad.
Until Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Meer says, little truly common ground existed on which the United States and Britain could debate slavery. In addition to cutting across class, gender, and national lines, the novel tapped into a huge, preexisting transatlantic appetite for blackface performance. Even as it condemned slavery, however, Uncle Tom’s Cabin was ambiguous about racial equality, and it portrayed blacks in demeaning ways. This gave copycat novels and minstrel stagings leeway to stray from Harriet Beecher Stowe’s intentions. Minstrel-show versions in particular had a huge influence on later incarnations of the Uncle Tom story, converting the character into “a comic, or worse, a proslavery stooge” -a scorned figure in our popular memory.
To look at how and why Uncle Tom’s Cabin “both advocated emancipation and licensed a plethora of racist imitators,” Meer places it in the context of contemporary minstrel sketches, melodramas, songs, jokes, newspaper commentaries, slave narratives, travel writing, proslavery novels, and even Uncle Tom merchandise like china figurines and wallpaper. She goes on to discuss Harriet Beecher Stowe’s travelogue Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands and her second novel, Dred. The publication of each unleashed the political energies of Uncle Tom’s Cabin and its revisions yet again.
Pictorial Victorians: The Inscription of Values in Word and Image
Julia Thomas
The Victorians were image obsessed. The middle decades of the nineteenth century saw an unprecedented growth in the picture industry. Technological advances enabled the Victorians to adorn with images the pages of their books and the walls of their homes. But this was not a wholly visual culture. Pictorial Victorians focuses on two of the most popular mid-nineteenth-century genres-illustration and narrative painting-that blurred the line between the visual and textual.
Illustration negotiated text and image on the printed page, while narrative painting juxtaposed the two media in its formulation of pictorial stories. Author Julia Thomas reassesses mid-nineteenth-century values in the light of this interplay. The dialogue between word and image generates meanings that are intimately related to the Victorians' image of themselves. Illustrations in Victorian publications and the narrative scenes that lined the walls of the Royal Academy reveal the Victorians' ideas about the world in which they lived and their notions of gender, class, and race.
Pictorial Victorians surveys a range of material, from representations of the crinoline, to the illustrations that accompanied Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel Uncle Tom's Cabin and Tennyson's poetry, to paintings of adultery. It demonstrates that the space between text and image is one in which values are both constructed and questioned.
The 'Tragic Mulatta' Revisited: Race and Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century Antislavery Fiction
Eve Allegra Raimon
Since its inception, the United States has been intensely preoccupied with interracialism. The concept is embedded everywhere in our social and political fabric, including our sense of national identity. And yet, in both its quantitative and symbolic forms, interracialism remains an extremely elusive phenomenon, causing policy makers and census boards to wrangle over how to delineate it and, on an emblematic level, stirring intense emotions from fear to fascination.
In The “Tragic Mulatta” Revisited, Eve Allegra Raimon focuses on the mixed-race female slave in literature, arguing that this figure became a symbolic vehicle for explorations of race and nation—both of which were in crisis in the mid-nineteenth century. At this time, judicial, statutory, social, and scientific debates about the meaning of racial difference (and intermixture) coincided with disputes over frontier expansion, which were never merely about land acquisition but also literally about the “complexion” of that frontier. Embodying both northern and southern ideologies, the “amalgamated” mulatta, the author argues, can be viewed as quintessentially American, a precursor to contemporary motifs of “hybrid” and “mestizo” identities.
Where others have focused on the gendered and racially abject position of the “tragic mulatta,” Raimon reconsiders texts by such central antislavery writers as Lydia Maria Child, William Wells Brown, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Harriet Wilson to suggest that the figure is more usefully examined as a way of understanding the volatile and shifting interface of race and national identity in the antebellum period.
The Beecher Sisters
Barbara White
The Beecher sisters - Catharine, Harriet and Isabella - were three of the most prominent women in 19th-century America. Daughters of the famous evangelist Lyman Beecher, they could not follow their father and seven brothers into the ministry. Nonetheless, they carved out pathbreaking careers for themselves. Catharine Beecher founded the Hartford Female Seminary and devoted her life to improving women's education. Harriet Beecher Stowe became world famous as the author of "Uncle Tom's Cabin". Isabella Beecher Hooker was an outspoken advocate for women's rights. This is a joint biography of the sisters, whose lives spanned the full course of the 19th century. The life of Isabella Beecher is examined in particular detail here. Drawing on little-used sources, Barbara White explores Isabella's political development and her interactions with her sisters and with prominent people of the time - from Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton to Mark Twain.
The Grammar of Good Intentions: Race & the Antebellum Culture of Benevolence
Susan Ryan
Susan M. Ryan explores antebellum Americans’ preoccupation with the language and practice of benevolence. Drawing on a variety of cultural and literary texts, she traces how people working and writing within social reform movements—and their outspoken opponents—helped solidify racial and class ideologies that ultimately marginalized even the most "deserving" poor. "The links between race and the relations of benevolence occasioned much soul-searching among antebellum Americans," Ryan explains. "In a period of heated public debate over issues such as slavery, Indian removal, and non-Protestant immigration, the categories of blackness, Indianness, and a generic ‘foreignness’ came to signify, for many whites, need itself."
Ryan puts familiar literary works such as Herman Melville’s The Confidence-Man, Frederick Douglass’s My Bondage and My Freedom, and Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin back into dialogue with a broad range of print materials: the reports of charity societies, African American and Native American newspapers, juvenile fiction, travel writing, cartoons, sermons, and tract literature. In the process, she dispels the myth that authors usually classified as literary were responding to a simple and unquestioned cult of benevolence. Rather, she contends, they were participating in the complex and often rancorous debates occurring within the broader culture over how good intentions should be expressed and enacted.
Ryan’s inquiry into the antebellum culture of benevolence has implications for contemporary U.S. society, resonating especially with recent debates over welfare reform, the politics of compassionate conservatism, and representations of "welfare queens" and violent urban youth. As Ryan writes, "The conversations that this book reconstructs remind us of our ongoing participation in the national ritual of laying claim to good intentions."
The Masochistic Pleasures of Sentimental Literature
Marianne Noble
For generations, critics have noticed in nineteenth-century American women's sentimentality a streak of masochism, but their discussions of it have over-simplified its complex relationship to women's power. Marianne Noble argues that tropes of eroticized domination in sentimental literature must be recognized for what they were: a double-edged sword of both oppression and empowerment. She begins by exploring the cultural forces that came together to create this ideology of desire, particularly Protestant discourses relating suffering to love and middle-class discourses of "true womanhood." She goes on to demonstrate how sentimental literature takes advantage of the expressive power in the convergence of these two discourses to imagine women's romantic desire. Therefore, in sentimental literature, images of eroticized domination are not antithetical to female pleasure but rather can be constitutive of it. The book, however, does not simply celebrate that fact. In readings of Warner's The Wide Wide World, Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, and Dickinson's sentimental poetry, it addresses the complex benefits and costs of nineteenth-century women's literary masochism. Ultimately it shows how these authors both exploited and were shaped by this discursive practice.
Beechers, Stowes, and Yankee Strangers: The Transformation of Florida
John T. Foster Jr. and Sarah Whitmer Foster
Modern Florida--a world of tourists, retirees from the North, and novel agricultural crops--began among a group of Yankee reformers at the end of the Civil War, including Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and her brother, Charles, who lived in Florida between 1867 and 1885. This book tells the story of the group--and their designs for a postwar Florida--with the action, atmosphere, and insight of a good novel.
Arriving in Florida nearly two decades ahead of Henry Flagler, the Beechers found a wild and inaccessible state with small remnants of a slave economy. As part of the work of Reconstruction, they dreamed of making the state a haven for freedmen and progressive northerners unhampered by the rest of the South’s racial divisions. Settling near Tallahassee and Jacksonville, they worked with Florida’s First Lady, Chloe Merrick Reed, to better education, religion, economics, social and racial relationships, and politics, and they were instrumental in the transformation of Jacksonville from a small seaport to a vibrant city.
Despite continuing interest in Harriet Beecher Stowe, her years in Florida have remained obscure; even less is known about Charles Beecher during this period. Using fresh materials that have never been recorded by the Stowe Center (a major repository of Stowe’s works), John and Sarah Foster fill an important gap in the lives of these celebrated reformers and shed new light on Florida’s history during Reconstruction and the Gilded Age.
The Oxford Harriet Beecher Stowe Reader
Joan Hedrick
While best known for the immensely popular and controversial novel Uncle Tom's Cabin, Harriet Beecher Stowe is also the author of an extensive body of additional work on American culture and politics. Playing many roles--journalist, pamphleteer, novelist, preacher, and advisor on domestic affairs--Stowe used the written word as a vehicle for religious, social, and political commentaries, often leavening them with entertainment in order to reach a broad audience. She had a profound effect on American culture, not because her ideas were unique, but because they were common. What made her so radical was that she insisted on putting her ideas into action.
The Oxford Harriet Beecher Stowe Reader offers a focused collection of Stowe's writings from the 1830s through the 1860s. Illustrating her broad range, rhetorical strategies, and cultural designs on the world, it is ideal for courses in nineteenth-century American literature, women's literature, and American history. The volume collects those selections best suited for classroom use, reprinting many pieces here for the first time. Editor Joan D. Hedrick provides a substantial introduction that assesses Stowe's vital impact on nineteenth-century American literature, politics, and culture. The readings are divided into three sections: Early Sketches, Antislavery Writings, and Domestic Culture and Politics. Early Sketches presents the finest writing of Stowe's literary apprenticeship. Antislavery Writings includes Uncle Tom's Cabin in its entirety, placing it in the context of Stowe's considerable and often-overlooked body of other antislavery writings. This section also includes a generous selection from A Key To Uncle Tom's Cabin, a companion volume to the novel. Domestic Culture and Politics shows the scope of Stowe's thinking on the Victorian home, for which she was a major propagandist. The inclusion here of "The True Story of Lady Byron's Life," an exposé of male debauchery and incest at the core of a nineteenth-century home, represents Stowe's willingness to tackle the most challenging political and social issues of her time.
Home Fronts: Domesticity and Its Critics in the Antebellum United States
Lora Romero
Unlike studies of nineteenth-century culture that perpetuate a dichotomy of a public, male world set against a private, female world, Lora Romero’s Home Fronts shows the many, nuanced, and sometimes contradictory cultural planes on which struggles for authority unfolded in antebellum America.
Romero remaps the literary landscape of the last century by looking at the operations of domesticity on the frontier as well as within the middle-class home and by reconsidering such crucial (if sometimes unexpected) sites for the workings of domesticity as social reform movements, African-American activism, and homosocial high culture. In the process, she indicts theories of the nineteenth century based on binarisms and rigidity while challenging models of power and resistance based on the idea that "culture" has the capacity to either free or enslave. Through readings of James Fenimore Cooper, Catherine Beecher, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Maria Stewart, and Nathaniel Hawthorne, Romero shows how the politics of culture reside in local formulations rather than in essential and ineluctable political structures.
Weapons of Women Writers: Bertha von Suttner's Die Waffen nieder as Political Literature in the Tradition of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin
Regina Braker
This study explores the claim that Bertha von Suttner's anti-war novel Die Waffen nieder was the «Uncle Tom's Cabin of the peace movement,» which originated in a comment from a letter to Suttner from Leo Tolstoy. The two novels are compared on the basis of Tolstoy's theory of art, with focus on the didactic purpose and moral message of each novel. While Uncle Tom's Cabin is a work of moral suasion with an unabashed appeal to feeling, the analysis of militarism in Die Waffen nieder differs in scope and form and in its self-conscious use of sentimentality as a convention, even as its critique of social and political institutions is equally substantial.
Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Life
Joan Hedrick
"Up to this year I have always felt that I had no particular call to meddle with this subject....But I feel now that the time is come when even a woman or a child who can speak a word for freedom and humanity is bound to speak." Thus did Harriet Beecher Stowe announce her decision to begin work on what would become one of the most influential novels ever written. The subject she had hesitated to "meddle with" was slavery, and the novel, of course, was Uncle Tom's Cabin. Still debated today for its portrayal of African Americans and its unresolved place in the literary canon, Stowe's best-known work was first published in weekly installments from June 5, 1851 to April 1, 1852. It caused such a stir in both the North and South, and even in Great Britain, that when Stowe met President Lincoln in 1862 he is said to have greeted her with the words, "So you are the little woman who wrote the book that created this great war!"
In this landmark book, the first full-scale biography of Harriet Beecher Stowe in over fifty years, Joan D. Hedrick tells the absorbing story of this gifted, complex, and contradictory woman. Hedrick takes readers into the multilayered world of nineteenth century morals and mores, exploring the influence of then-popular ideas of "true womanhood" on Stowe's upbringing as a member of the outspoken Beecher clan, and her eventful life as a writer and shaper of public opinion who was also a mother of seven. It offers a lively record of the flourishing parlor societies that launched and sustained Stowe throughout the 44 years of her career, and the harsh physical realities that governed so many women's lives. The epidemics, high infant mortality, and often disastrous medical practices of the day are portrayed in moving detail, against the backdrop of western expansion, and the great social upheaval accompanying the abolitionist movement and the entry of women into public life.
Here are Stowe's public triumphs, both before and after the Civil War, and the private tragedies that included the death of her adored eighteen month old son, the drowning of another son, and the alcohol and morphine addictions of two of her other children. The daughter, sister, and wife of prominent ministers, Stowe channeled her anguish and her ambition into a socially acceptable anger on behalf of others, transforming her private experience into powerful narratives that moved a nation.
Magisterial in its breadth and rich in detail, this definitive portrait explores the full measure of Harriet Beecher Stowe's life, and her contribution to American literature. Perceptive and engaging, it illuminates the career of a major writer during the transition of literature from an amateur pastime to a profession, and offers a fascinating look at the pains, pleasures, and accomplishments of women's lives in the last century.
Message, Messenger, and Response: Puritan Forms and Cultural Reformation in Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin
Gladys Sherman Lewis
Harriet Beecher Stowe caused social change with her literary strategies formed by Puritanism and sentimentality. This book analyzes the design she created with Puritan genres, voice, and audience in Uncle Tom's Cabin to provide a methodology for social change, demonstrating the power of sermon and narrative in tension in American literary history.
Domestic Individualism: Imagining Self in Nineteenth-Century America
Gillian Brown
Gillian Brown's book probes the key relationship between domestic ideology and formulations of the self in nineteenth-century America. Arguing that domesticity institutes gender, class, and racial distinctions that govern masculine as well as feminine identity, Brown brilliantly alters, for literary critics, feminists, and cultural historians, the critical perspective from which nineteenth-century American literature and culture have been viewed.
In this study of the domestic constitution of individualism, Brown traces how the values of interiority, order, privacy, and enclosure associated with the American home come to define selfhood in general. By analyzing writings by Stowe, Hawthorne, Melville, Fern, and Gilman, and by examining other contemporary cultural modes—abolitionism, consumerism, architecture, interior decorating, motherhood, mesmerism, hysteria, and agoraphobia—she reconfigures the parameters of both domesticity and the patterns of self it fashions. Unfolding a representational history of the domestic, Brown's work offers striking new readings of the literary texts as well as of the cultural contexts that they embody.
Harriet Beecher Stowe
John Adams
Devoted to critical interpretation and discussion of an author's work, each study takes account of major literary trends and important scholarly contributions and provides new critical insights with an original point of view. An Authors Series volume addresses readers ranging from advanced high school students to university professors. The book suggests to the informed reader new ways of considering a writer's work. A reader new to the work under examination will, after reading the Authors Series, be compelled to turn to the originals, bringing to the reading a basic knowledge and fresh critical perspectives.
The Limits of Sisterhood: The Beecher Sisters on Women's Rights and Woman's Sphere
Anne Margolis, Mary Kelley, and Jeanne Boydston
In a century almost continually at odds with the proper place of females, Catherine Esther Beecher, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Isabella Beecher Hooker shared a commitment to women's power. Although they did not always agree on the nature of that power, each in her own way--Catherine as educator and author of advice literature; Harriet as author of novels, tales, and sketches; and Isabella as a women's rights advocate--devoted much of her adult life to elevating women's status and expanding women's influence.
Black and White Women of the Old South: The Peculiar Sisterhood in American Literature
Minrose Gwin
Considering fictional characters and autobiographical reflections of female experience, Minrose C. Gwin explores the volatile, often violent connection between black and white woman of the Old South. She shows that their relationship in American literature offers a paradigm of the Southern racial experience-its antipathy and guilt on the one hand, its very real bonding through common suffering on the other. Gwin's study encompasses a wide range of books, including abolitionist and pro slavery fiction of the mid-nineteenth century, women's slave narratives and journals, and modern fictional treatments of Southern slavery by Faulkner, Cather, and Margaret Walker. She analyzes such diverse works as Mary Chestnut's Civil War and Harriet Jacob's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Her pioneering interpetations enable us to understand the Southern past more fully, to identify new critical relationships between works of literature, and to discern fresh implications of female experience.
The Pearl of Orr's Island
Bruce Kirkham
This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1896 edition. Excerpt: ... CHAPTER Vin THE SEEN AND THE UNSEEN Life on any shore is a dull affair, -- ever degenerating into commonplace; and this may account for the eagerness with which even a great calamity is sometimes accepted in a neighborhood, as affording wherewithal to stir the deeper feelings of our nature. Thus, though Mrs. Kittridge was by no means a hard-hearted woman, and would not for the world have had a ship wrecked on her particular account, yet since a ship had been wrecked and a body floated ashore at her very door, as it were, it afforded her no inconsiderable satisfaction to dwell on the details and to arrange for the funeral. It was something to talk about and to think of, and likely to furnish subject-matter for talk for years to come when she should go out to tea with any of her acquaintances who lived at Middle Bay, or Maquoit, or Harpswell Neck. For although in those days, -- the number of light-houses being much smaller than it is now, -- it was no uncommon thing for ships to be driven on shore in storms, yet this incident had undeniably more that was stirring and romantic in it than any within the memory of any tea-table gossip in the vicinity. Mrs. Kittridge, therefore, looked forward to the funeral services on Sunday afternoon as to a species of solemn fete, which imparted a sort of consequence to her dwelling and herself. Notice of it was to be given out in "meeting" after service, and she might expect both keeping-room and kitchen to be full. Mrs. Pennel had offered to do her share of Christian and neighborly kindness, in taking home to her own dwelling the little boy. In fact, it became necessary to do so in order to appease the feelings of the little Mara, who clung to the new acquisition with most devoted fondness, and wept...
Harriet Beecher Stowe and American Literature
Ellen Moers
Harriet Beecher Stowe is best known for her novel Uncle Tom's Cabin, which played a significant role in accelerating the movement to abolish slavery in the United States.
Harriet and the Runaway Book: The Story of Harriet Beecher Stowe and Uncle Tom's Cabin
Johanna Johnston and Ronald Himaler
A biography of the woman who wrote Uncle Tom's Cabin, stressing the experiences and impressions which caused her to write the famous book denouncing slavery.
The Building of Uncle Tom's Cabin
Bruce Kirkham
In a careful reconstruction of the making of the novel, Professor Kirkham investigates its sources in political occurrences during the anti-slavery movement, social and family milieu, and publications of the early nineteenth century. Anecdotes, themes and styles through Stowe's letters and earlier writings provide further insight.
Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Biography
Noel Gerson
“So this is the little lady who made this big war,” marvelled Abraham Lincoln when he first met Harriet Beecher Stowe.
Noel Gerson explores the life of this fascinating woman who literally changed the course of American history with her book Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
Harriet Beecher Stowe reveals a towering literary figure who was also a remarkable woman, a crusading feminist, and a woman who led a life more dramatic than anything she wrote.
In an age when women were usually confined to the kitchen, the bedroom, and the parlour, Harriet Beecher Stowe argued emancipation with President Lincoln, had an extraordinary woman-to-woman relationship with Queen Victoria, and was regarded by Emile Zola as a comrade-in-arms in their separate crusades for a better world.
Her super-abundant energy and refreshing humour enabled her to combine the duties of a devoted wife and mother of five with a renowned literary career and to become in the process one of the greatest celebrities of the nineteenth century.
‘Harriet Beecher Stowe’ is an impressive biography of a literary giant who changed the course of history forever.
Uncle Tom's Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly
Kenneth Lynn
Uncle Tom's Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly, is an anti-slavery novel by American author Harriet Beecher Stowe. Published in 1852, the novel "helped lay the groundwork for the Civil War", according to Will Kaufman.
Stowe, a Connecticut-born teacher at the Hartford Female Seminary and an active abolitionist, featured the character of Uncle Tom, a long-suffering black slave around whom the stories of other characters revolve. The sentimental novel depicts the reality of slavery while also asserting that Christian love can overcome something as destructive as enslavement of fellow human beings.
Uncle Tom's Cabin was the best-selling novel of the 19th century and the second best-selling book of that century, following the Bible. It is credited with helping fuel the abolitionist cause in the 1850s. In the first year after it was published, 300,000 copies of the book were sold in the United States; one million copies were sold in Great Britain. In 1855, three years after it was published, it was called "the most popular novel of our day." The impact attributed to the book is great, reinforced by a story that when Abraham Lincoln met Stowe at the start of the Civil War, Lincoln declared, "So this is the little lady who started this great war." The quote is apocryphal; it did not appear in print until 1896, and it has been argued that "The long-term durability of Lincoln's greeting as an anecdote in literary studies and Stowe scholarship can perhaps be explained in part by the desire among many contemporary intellectuals ... to affirm the role of literature as an agent of social change."
The book and the plays it inspired helped popularize a number of stereotypes about black people. These include the affectionate, dark-skinned "mammy"; the "pickaninny" stereotype of black children; and the "Uncle Tom", or dutiful, long-suffering servant faithful to his white master or mistress. In recent years, the negative associations with Uncle Tom's Cabin have, to an extent, overshadowed the historical impact of the book as a "vital antislavery tool."