Uncle Tom's Cabin: Essential Civil War Curriculum

2021

Civil War history is more than following battle plans and moving red and blue lines on a map . . . To understand Americans in the 1860s is difficult enough. At least we have Harriet Beecher Stowe to remind us of their complex moral lives and the decisions they made concerning human bondage. For these reasons, Harriet Beecher Stowe\u27s Uncle Tom\u27s Cabin is still worth the read

The Oxford History of the Novel in English, 2014

Uncle Tom's Cabin is a novel written by Harriet Beecher Stowe in 1852. It dealt with the slavery in America in antebellum era. Regarding this context, there are two issues emerging in the novel i.e. philanthropy conducted by the white people and piety held by the black people or the slaves. So, this paper discusses a problematic statement that is how philanthropy and piety are significant in sense of facing the heartless slavery of the blacks. Both issues appear in two different plots; that is, a plot dealing with Eliza and George running away to Canada, and the other dealing with Uncle Tom who does not want to run away but remains loyally as a slave until his death. This paper applies Mukarovsky's dynamic structuralism as a theoretical framework to analyze the issues of philanthropy and piety, namely, by utilizing the historical, philosophical, and cultural facts as the materials to elaborate the literary facts. Through this study, it is finally found out that Stowe uses a double plot in order to emphasize that philanthropy conducted by some white people and the slave's piety in embracing Christianity were really occurred in the antebellum era, pre-Civil War era (1851-1856) in the United States. Besides, this paper finds out that either philanthropy or piety is the ways for the characters of the novel to achieve their freedom. Concretely the freedom in this case refers to both physical and spiritual meanings.

Teaching American Literature, 2022

An overview of the uses of American Civil War texts, post-Civil War texts, novels about the Civil War, Edmund Wilson's Patriotic Gore, and diaries and letters for literature and history classes.

Journal of Transnational American Studies, 2020

The period of the Civil War resulted in the outpouring of war-related literature. War poetry, histories, anecdotes, sensational war novels, war humor, war songs, war juvenile books and many other war related-pieces emerged into the popular culture of the time. While the quality of Civil War literature was always a controversial subject, many of these pieces shaped the cultural politics of war and changed the meaning of patriotism, gender, and race, and resulted in the emergence of new identities.

Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom 's Cabin; or, Negro Life in the Slave States of America, has been hailed as an anti-slavery novel that helped to lay the groundwork for the Civil War in the US. The novel was published in 1852, and was originally serialized in an anti-slavery newspaper,

2007

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 analyzed 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.

In order to understand Harriet Beecher Stowe’s political agenda it seems necessary to verify how, and to what extent the slaves characters in Uncle Tom’s Cabin show a stable, social and familial life-style that establishes them as civilized human beings, capable to manage themselves to live in a civilized society. Based on such construction Stowe attempts to create a coherent sense of identity of these people, which although seemingly mistaken, yet can be part of her political tactic.

2018