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.
For almost a hundred years before Uncle Tom's Cabin burst on to the scene in 1852, the American theatre struggled to represent the evils of slavery. Slavery and Sentiment questions how the text, images, and performances presented to American audiences during the antebellum period engaged with the debate over black participation in American society. The book reconsiders traditional comic stereotypes like Jim Crow, as well as familiar sentimental ones, such as Uncle Tom. Using plays, poetry, performances, popular novels, and political cartoons, Heather Nathans blends American history, theatre history, and literary history to question how theatre and performance lifted the 'veil of black' on American racism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The book contributes to the ongoing discussion of the role of African-American characters and performers in American cultural history, offering scholars in a range of fields a new perspective on a complicated moment in the nation's theatrical
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.
Between the years 1850 and 1855 there appeared, in rapid succession, five American books now universally recognised as classics: The Scarlet Letter, Moby Dick, Uncle Tom's Cabin, Walden and Leaves of Grass. This study seeks to clarify that extraordinary half-decade in the rise of American literature. In successive chapters Professor Lease analyses the British connections of ten American writers, from Washington Irving to Walt Whitman. He considers their struggle for cultural independence through their engagement with, reaction to and gradual acceptance by the established English world of letters. These Anglo-American encounters are a dramatic series of portraits that provide new perspectives for understanding the career, the quest for nationality and the imaginative world of each of these major contributors to the shaping of an American literature.
Audrey Fisch's study, first published in 2000, examines the circulation within England of the people and ideas of the black Abolitionist campaign. During the 1850s, African-Americans and others active in the campaign to abolish slavery, journeyed to England to present the slave experience and rouse opposition to American slavery. By focusing on Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, an anonymous sequel to that novel, Uncle Tom in England, and John Brown's Slave Life in Georgia, and the lecture tours of free blacks and ex-slaves, Fisch follows the discourse of American abolitionism as it moved across the Atlantic and was reshaped by domestic Victorian debates about popular culture and taste, the worker versus the slave, popular education, and working class self-improvement. Despite its popular appeal, she claims, the African-American abolitionist campaign actually re-energised English nationalism. This book will be of interest to students of African-American literature, and nineteen
"No work in modern literature, with the possible exception of Uncle Tom's Cabin, can compete with What Is to Be Done? in its effect on human lives and its power to make history."—Joseph Frank, The Sou
More movies have been produced about the Civil War than about any other aspect of American history. From 1903 (Uncle Tom's Cabin) to the present, film studios have released more than eight hundred si
How the Other Half Lives occupies a premier place on a small list of American books--along with Uncle Tom's Cabin, The Jungle, Silent Spring, The Feminine Mystique, and Unsafe at Any Speed--that
