Paul H (2018)
Publication Language: English
Publication Type: Book chapter / Article in edited volumes
Publication year: 2018
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH
Edited Volumes: Handbook of the American Novel of the Nineteenth Century
Series: Handbooks of English and American Studies
City/Town: Berlin/Munich/Boston
Book Volume: 7
Pages Range: 281-297
ISBN: 9783110480818
DOI: 10.1515/9783110481327-016
This essay provides an introduction to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s sentimental reform novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin (in the following: UTC), places the text in its historical context, and sketches its nineteenth- and twentieth-century reception history. Written in response to the second Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, the novel is often considered as a singularly important abolitionist intervention and as a persuasive voice in the anti-slavery struggle - albeit at the expense of having created some of the most powerful stereotypes of African Americans. In addition, the novel has been considered a formidable piece of women’s writing and a feminist text. Thirdly, the prominent role of religion has been pointed out with regard to its ‘higher’ argumentative logic (“God wrote it”) and its conversion formula. The popularity of the novel has led to a rich consumer culture and to a transnational commodification of its theme (the novel was even more popular in Britain than in the U.S.) as well as to a mass-cultural dramatic tradition (in the shape of sensationalist Uncle Tom plays); the latter has somewhat hampered an adequate scholarly reception of the book way into the second half of the twentieth century even as the text itself exhibits a rich repertoire of romantic and sentimental representational strategies and literary devices. Today, UTC is fully canonized as a superb yet still controversial piece of sentimental literature.
APA:
Paul, H. (2018). Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin: Or, Life Among the Lowly (1852). In Christine Gerhardt (Eds.), Handbook of the American Novel of the Nineteenth Century. (pp. 281-297). Berlin/Munich/Boston: Walter de Gruyter GmbH.
MLA:
Paul, Heike. "Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin: Or, Life Among the Lowly (1852)." Handbook of the American Novel of the Nineteenth Century. Ed. Christine Gerhardt, Berlin/Munich/Boston: Walter de Gruyter GmbH, 2018. 281-297.
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