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Introduction
No full textHarriet Beecher Stowe's most famous introduction took place on or around Thanksgiving Day, 1862, when she was introduced to President Abraham Lincoln, who allegedly greeted her with these memorable words, “So you're the little woman who wrote the book that made this great war! ” Even if we grant Lincoln's statement its obvious degree of ironic intention, he, nevertheless, makes quite a claim for the impact of Uncle Tom's Cabin on American history. One glance at virtually any of Lincoln's speeches reveals that he, like Stowe, believed that the power of words could alter the minds and hearts of individuals. Stowe's faith in the transforming capacity of language makes a great deal of sense, given that she came from a distinguished family of ministers and social activists - in an 1851 letter to Frederick Douglass, she writes, “I am a ministers daughter - a ministers wife & I have had six brothers in the ministry . . . & I certainly ought to know something of the feelings of ministers.” Stowe here refers to her father, Lyman Beecher, President of Lane Seminary, her husband, Calvin Stowe, who served at various times as Professor at Lane Seminary, Professor of the Chair of Sacred Literature at Andover Theological Seminary and Professor at Bowdoin College, and her brothers, the most famous of whom was Henry Ward Beecher, head of the prestigious Congregationalist Plymouth Church in Brooklyn and anti-slavery activist. This list, it should be noted, doesn’t even mention her influential sisters, Catharine Beecher, founder of the Hartford Female Seminary and author of many tracts, including A Treatise on Domestic Economy, and Isabelle Beecher Hooker, whose close ties to Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony made Isabelle an important figure in the campaign for women’s rights. To what extent Stowe’s own words of ministration and protest catapulted the nation toward Civil War is an unanswerable question, but clearly Stowe wanted her novel to bring about great social change and Lincoln thought she had succeeded
The Cambridge Companion to Harriet Beecher Stowe
No full textThe Cambridge Companion to Harriet Beecher Stowe establishes new parameters for both scholarly and classroom discussion of Beecher Stowe's writing and life. This collection of specially commissioned essays provides new perspectives on the frequently read classic Uncle Tom's Cabin, as well as on topics of perennial interest, such as Stowe's representation of race, her attitude to reform, and her relationship to the American novel. The volume investigates Stowe's impact on the American literary tradition and the novel of social change. Contributions also offer lucid and provocative readings that analyze Stowe's writings through a variety of contexts, including antebellum reform, regionalism, law and the protest novel. Fresh, accessible, and engaged, this is the most up to date introduction available to Stowe's work. The volume, which offers a comprehensive chronology of Stowe's life and a helpful guide to further reading, will be of interest to students and teachers alike
The Literature of Labor and the Labors of Literature: Allegory in Nineteenth-Century American Fiction
No full textThe Literature of Labor and the Labors of Literature juxtaposes representations of labour in fictional texts and non-fictional texts in order to trace the intersections between aesthetic and economic discourse in nineteenth-century America. Both allegory and the new forms of labour produced a version of personhood that seemed frighteningly flat, a flatness that attacked the substance of the work ethic and, indeed, the very foundations of American individualism. Using this contextualized model of allegory, Weinstein argues that texts by Hawthorne, Melville, Twain and Adams are best understood both as allegories of labour (that is, the allegorical representations of the nature and cost of being a labouring being) and labours of allegory (that is, the visibility of the author's work of representation). Weinstein revolutionizes the notion of allegorical narrative, which is exposed as a literary medium of greater depth and consequence than has previously been implied - a working authorial vehicle for engaged and at times socially turbulent thought
Time, Tense, and American Literature: When Is Now?
No full textIn Time, Tense, and American Literature, Cindy Weinstein examines canonical American authors who employ a range of tenses to tell a story that has already taken place. This book argues that key texts in the archive of American literature are inconsistent in their retrospective status, ricocheting between past, present and future. Taking 'The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym' as her point of departure, Weinstein shows how Poe's way of representing time involves careening tenses, missing chronometers and inoperable watches, thus establishing a vocabulary of time that is at once anticipated in the fiction of Charles Brockden Brown and further articulated in works by Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Theodore Dreiser and Edward P. Jones. Each chapter examines the often strange narrative fabric of these novels and presents an opportunity to understand how especially complicated historical moments, from the founding of the new nation to the psychic consequences of the Civil War, find contextual expression through a literary uncertainty about time
A Question of Time: American Literature from Colonial Encounter to Contemporary Fiction
No full textThis book brings together leading critics in American literature to address the representation of time throughout a wide range of genres, methodologies, and chronological periods. American literature, from its beginnings to the present, provides a particularly rich set of texts to examine in this regard, with its interest in history, modernity and progress. Each essay considers how time embeds itself in a variety of textual representations, including Native American rituals, Shaker dances, novels, poetry, and magazines in order to provide readers with a capacious view of time's constitutive role in American literature. The essays are organized into four sections - Materializing Time, Performing Time, Timing Time, and Theorizing Time. Each section reflects a particular approach to the question of time, but taken as a whole the volume makes visible unexpected temporal patterns that cut across time period and genre
Family, Kinship, and Sympathy in Nineteenth-Century American Literature
Full text linkIn Family, Kinship, and Sympathy in Nineteenth-Century American Literature Cindy Weinstein radically revises our understanding of nineteenth-century sentimental literature in the United States. She argues that these novels are far more complex than critics have suggested. Rather than confirming the power of the bourgeois family, Weinstein argues, sentimental fiction used the destruction of the biological family as an opportunity to reconfigure the family in terms of love rather than consanguinity. Their texts intervened in debates about slavery, domestic reform and other social issues of the time. Weinstein shows how canonical texts, such as Melville's Pierre and works by Stowe and Twain, can take on new meaning when read in the context of nineteenth-century sentimental fiction. Through intensive close readings of a wide range of novels, this groundbreaking study demonstrates the aesthetic and political complexities in this important and influential genre
American Literature’s Aesthetic Dimensions
No full textRethinking the category of aesthetics in light of recent developments in literary theory and social criticism, the contributors to this volume showcase the interpretive possibilities available to those who bring politics, culture, ideology, and conceptions of identity into their critiques. Essays combine close readings of individual works and authors with more theoretical discussions of aesthetic theory and its relation to American literature. In their introduction, Weinstein and Looby argue that aesthetics never left American literary critique. Instead, the essay casts the current "return to aesthetics" as the natural consequence of shortcomings in deconstruction and new historicism, which led to a reconfiguration of aesthetics.
Subsequent essays demonstrate the value and versatility of aesthetic considerations in literature, from eighteenth-century poetry to twentieth-century popular music. Organized into four groups—politics, form, gender, and theory—contributors revisit the canonical works of Henry James, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Stephen Crane, introduce the overlooked texts of Constance Fenimore Woolson and Earl Lind, and unpack the complexities of the music of The Carpenters. Deeply rooted in an American context, these essays explore literature's aesthetic dimensions in connection to American liberty and the formation of political selfhood
Introduction to the Oxford Classical Edition of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s
No full textCindy Weinstein's Introduction considers the novel's autobiographical, historical, and literary contexts, and the tension between the seventeenth-century and nineteenth-century sensibilities. It also examines how its themes intersect with women writers of the time
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A concise companion to American fiction 1900-1950
Full text linkAn authoritative guide to American literature, this Companion examines the experimental forms, socio-cultural changes, literary movements, and major authors of the early 20th century. This Companion provides authoritative and wide-ranging guidance on early twentieth-century American fiction
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