LITR 4232 American Renaissance 2008
Text-Objective Presentation

Tuesday, 21 October: Harriet Beecher Stowe, 1698-1751, 1780-1792: introduction + selections from Uncle Tom’s Cabin

Text-Objective Discussion: Emily Newsome

Background:

1699 – “Catharine was a pioneer in women’s education and teacher training; Isabella turned to suffragism and women’s rights; Harriet wrote the most effective antislavery novel in the nation’s history.”

1700 – “[I]n the United States during the  last half of the nineteenth century it was outsold only by the Bible.”

2. To study the movement of "Romanticism," the narrative genre of "romance," and the related styles of the "gothic" and "the sublime." (The American Renaissance is the major period of American Romantic Literature.)

1712 – “Her husband’s sufferings and dangers, and the danger of her child, all blended in her mind, with a confused and stunning sense of the risk she was running, in leaving the only home she had ever known, and cutting loose from the protection of a friend whom she loved and revered. Then there was the parting from every familiar object…”

1714 – “As a fire in her bones, the thought of the pursuer urged her on; and she gazed with longing eyes on the sullen, surging waters that lay between her and liberty.”

1724 – “There was the impress of the despised race on her face, yet none could help feeling its mournful and pathetic beauty, while its stony sharpness, its cold, fixed, deathly aspect, struck a solemn chill over him.”

1727 – “and he has bought a place seven miles up the creek, here, back in the woods, where nobody goes, unless they go on purpose; and it’s a place that isn’t found in a hurry.”

1750 – “This, indeed, was a home,-home,-a word that George had never yet known a meaning for; and a belief in God, and a trust in his providence, began to encircle his heart, as, with a golden cloud of protections and confidence, dark, misanthropic, pining, atheistic doubts, and fierce despair, melted away before the light of a living Gospel…”

3. To use literature as a basis for discussing representative problems and subjects of American culture (Historicism), such as equality (race, gender, class); modernization and tradition; the individual, family; and community; nature; the role of writers in an anti-intellectual society.

1722 – “It’s a shameful, wicked, abominable law, and I’ll break it, for one, the first time I get a chance; and I hope I shall have a chance, I do!”

1722 – “Her husband and children were her entire world, and in these she ruled more by entreaty and persuasion than by command or argument.”

 Question:

"So this is the little lady who made this big war?" – Abraham Lincoln

Why would this novel have held such influence on the war?

1726, 1728

1729, 1731

1732, 1734

Question:

Who is Stowe most criticizing in this novel?

1744

1729