A critical and historical interpretation of Uncle Tom's Cabin, reflecting the best of recent scholarship.

Presents an annotated version of Harriet Beecher Stowe's classic novel "Uncle Tom's Cabin" that describes the lives of slaves and abolitionists in the 1800s, historical discussions of the Underground Railroad, slave trade, and plantation life, and advertisements that were influenced by the novel.

As Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin traveled around the world, it was molded by the imaginations and needs of international audiences. For over 150 years it has been coopted for a dazzling array of causes far from what its author envisioned. This book tells thirteen variants of Uncle Tom’s journey, explicating the novel’s significance for Canadian abolitionists and the Liberian political elite that constituted the runaway characters’ landing points; nineteenth-century French theatergoers; liberal Cuban, Romanian, and Spanish intellectuals and social reformers; Dutch colonizers and Filipino nationalists in Southeast Asia; Eastern European Cold War communists; Muslim readers and spectators in the Middle East; Brazilian television audiences; and twentieth-century German holidaymakers. Throughout these encounters, Stowe’s story of American slavery serves as a paradigm for understanding oppression, selectively and strategically refracting the African American slave onto other iconic victims and freedom fighters. The book brings together performance historians, literary critics, and media theorists to demonstrate how the myriad cultural and political effects of Stowe’s enduring story has transformed it into a global metanarrative with national, regional, and local specificity.

The American A social comedy about Christopher Newman, an American businessman on his first tour of Europe. Along the way, he finds a widow from an aristocratic French family.

“Fascinating . . . a lively and perceptive cultural history.” —Annette Gordon-Reed, The New Yorker 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.

Seminar paper from the year 1997 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: very good, University of Münster (English Seminar), language: English, abstract: Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel Uncle Tom's Cabin, which was first published in book form in 1852, is a work with a unique history of reception. In the nineteenth century it sold more copies than any book in the world except the Bible and became "the most cussed and discussed book of its time" 1. While in the 1850s slavery opponents hailed Stowe's novel as "the greatest weapon ever brought to bear in the abolitionist battle" 2, it was a hundred years later exposed to immense criticism, especially on the part of the blacks. Like Edmund Wilson reports, "it was still possible at the beginning of this century for a South Carolina teacher to make his pupils hold up their right hands and swear that they would never read Uncle Tom" 3. This research paper is intended to focus on why the reactions to this novel were so contradictory. After going into the general ideas of ‘race’ at Stowe's time, it will give an account of which attitudes towards this topic the writer herself expresses in Uncle Tom's Cabin and how these reply to the view of her contemporaries. This leads to the question whether one might, as it has often been the case, reproach Stowe for being a racist and whether her novel should still be discussed in today's classroom. 1 Langston Huges, quoted in Richard Yarborough, “Strategies of Black Characterization in Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the Early Afro-American Novel,“ New Essays on Uncle Tom’s Cabin, ed. Eric. J. Sundquist (Cambridge, 1986), 57. 2 Yarborough, 68 3 Yarborough, 66

This Companion provides fresh perspectives on the frequently read classic Uncle Tom's Cabin as well as on topics of perennial interest, such as Harriet Beecher Stowe's representation of race, her attitude to reform, and her relationship to the American novel. Cindy Weinstein comprehensively investigates Stowe's impact on the American literary tradition and the novel of social change.