Stowe's Uncle Research Articles

Beyond Isabel Archer's Door: The Underground Railroad and the Condemned Plot for Freedom

Abstract This article radically reframes Henry James's The Portrait of a Lady in relation to the Underground Railroad, the transatlantic slave trade, US slavery, and racial housing segregation. Focusing on the house in Albany, New York, where Isabel Archer stays in the 1850s, it asserts that Isabel's pursuit of freedom is grounded in her 1850s childhood when the Underground Railroad was particularly active in Albany. It examines the Albany home within the historical context of the 1870s and 1880s, when, respectively, Isabel returns to Albany and The Portrait of a Lady was first published. Taking into account the Supreme Court's 1883 Civil Rights Cases, which facilitated housing discrimination against Black Americans, this article argues that the Albany home, whose door remains bolted to the “vulgar street,” protects James's American lady from a vulgarity associated then with African Americans. By examining a critically overlooked function of the Albany house—its spatial representation of the novel's plot—this article shows how narratives of Black people escaping slavery along with late nineteenth-century definitions of vulgarity centrally define Isabel's pursuit of freedom. Analyzing the plot's architecture, the article reveals how James strategically alludes to two novels about racism—overtly to George Eliot's Daniel Deronda and covertly to Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin—to construct his highly influential narrative about a white woman's transatlantic journey toward freedom.

CRUELTY OF SLAVERY IN AMERICA AS SEEN IN HARRIET BEECHER STOWE’S UNCLE TOM’S CABIN

The purpose of this research is to examine the cruelty of slavery in America as shown inHarriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin. It is done to show the many sorts ofenslavement cruelty present in the novel, as well as the causes of the brutality in thestory. The writers have decided to undertake this research using qualitative methods.The writers employ a socio-historical method to data analysis. In the discussion isdivided into several indicators, such as cruelty of slavery which is divided into slavetreat as thing or properties and object of physical violence. The other indicator is slavessuffer as the effect cruelty of slavery which divided into racism, discrimination, slaves’life is restricted and rebellion. Based on the results of the discussion, it can be concludedthat slavery has happened to black people who are very cruel in America and evenlegalized. South Americans treat black people as slaves inhumanely and treat them likeanimals.

Founded in Fiction: The Uses of Fiction in the Early United States by Thomas Koenigs

Reviewed by: Founded in Fiction: The Uses of Fiction in the Early United States by Thomas Koenigs Betsy Klimasmith (bio) Keywords Fiction, Literary history, Print culture Founded in Fiction: The Uses of Fiction in the Early United States. By Thomas Koenigs. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2021. Pp. 336. Cloth, $45.00.) [End Page 672] With Founded in Fiction Thomas Koenigs sets out to write a literary history of the United States before 1865 that de-centers the novel genre even as it "recovers the array of theories and varieties of fictionality that early U.S. writers developed as they wrestled with the most pressing political and social questions of their moment" (2). Koenigs calls attention to the multiplicity of fictional forms from the period that are not novels and convincingly argues that retrospectively labeling them as such obscures their richness and diversity as well as their distinctness from the novel genre. Koenigs explores a wide variety of texts: novels and other fictions along with the reviews and paratextual material that, he argues, explain to us not just how the texts were read, but the reasons why fictionists, as Koenigs calls them, wrote the kinds of texts they did. Bringing Catherine Gallagher's influential focus on fictionality to the U.S. context, Koenigs argues, allows him to make visible the range of roles fictional texts played in their uneven and incomplete movement from instrumental form to literary art. Founded in Fiction makes a convincing argument that readers and writers of the varieties of extended fiction that proliferated during this period understood fiction's worth and impact in many ways—didactic, political, and aesthetic, to name a few. In addressing the early U.S. print landscape, Koenigs explores familiar and forgotten texts as he moves through the decades, at first chronologically and then thematically. He persuades that a diversity of strange and rich fictional forms and aims makes early American literature exciting, especially when we take seriously and at face value responses to fictional texts, including sermons and reviews, but also the paratext and responses to fiction found within the works themselves. Though arguing that readers should not "back project" ideas about genre and reading onto older texts seems to run counter to the project of literary history, the wealth of material Koenigs presents underscores his point that we need to look more closely at fiction in the U.S. through a frame that encompasses the period's strange diversity. The first half of Founded in Fiction looks at U.S. literary production through 1820, an era whose strange and unwieldy fictional texts benefit most from Koenigs's approach. The categories into which the texts are divided are familiar: Chapter 1, for instance, puts "Tales of Truth"—or what Koenigs terms "nonfictional novels"—like Charlotte Temple, The Coquette, and The Power of Sympathy in conversation with one another, while Chapter 2, "Republican Fictions," considers Modern Chivalry, The Algerine Captive, and Wieland. These chapters read the literary texts in [End Page 673] conversation with reviews, paratext, prefaces, and comments about fiction—especially novels—expressed within the text by narrators and characters. Chapter 3 explores the least familiar group of texts and authors: the numerous extended fictions including Margaretta, Dorval, and Female Quixotism written by U.S. women between 1800 and 1820. This chapter offers a useful catalog of the decades' many overlooked fictional productions, but the sheer number of the texts mentioned means that attention to any single work (besides Margaretta), remains limited. In the second half of the book, which covers the decades during which novels became a more familiar and recognizable form (1820–1850), Koenigs moves to a more thematic treatment of fictionality, with chapters on historical fiction, hoaxing, social criticism, and enslavement. This approach pairs texts and authors—sometimes in expected ways, like Cooper and Sedgwick (history) and Sheppard Lee and the Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (hoaxes), and sometimes with more surprising duos, like the juxtaposition of Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin to Lippard's The Quaker City (social criticism). While it was heartening to see Koenigs attend to the thorny question of whether novels could provide white readers unmediated access to Black consciousness, which Frederick Douglass...

The French Reception of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: A Belated Consecration

The French Reception of <i>Adventures of Huckleberry Finn</i>: A Belated Consecration

The Neo-slave Narrative and Ishmael Reed's Flight to Canada

The Neo-slave Narrative and Ishmael Reed's Flight to Canada W. Lawrence Hogue (bio) Between the 1830s and the 1860s, African Americans published many slave narratives, including those of Frederick Douglass (1845) and Henry Bibb (1849). But perhaps the most influential slave narrative during this period was that of a white woman, Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, published in 1852. Even as Black writers rediscovered their African and African American cultural and historical past during the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s, there were only two narratives or novels about slavery, Arna Bontemps's Black Thunder (1936) and Zora Neale Hurston's Barracoon (1931).1 Nor were any narratives/novels about slavery written by African Americans in the 1940s or the 1950s. But the absence of texts about slavery by African Americans does not mean the absence of the image of slavery and the enslaved African American before the American public. Within the institutions of the ideological state apparatus, such as the media and education, Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin's influential and widespread construction of slavery was taught in high schools and colleges and was reproduced on television and in Holly-wood. There were many film adaptations of Stowe's novel, including nine from the silent era—especially Edwin S. Porter's 1903 twelve-minute film adaptation, in which Uncle Tom is "a childlike, unthinking, and happy slave" (hooks 2013, 99). Later there were Birth of a Nation (1915), Gone with the Wind (1939), Santa Fe Trail (1940), Song of the South (1946), and The Foxes of Harrow (1947)—all dealing with the Civil War, slavery, and Reconstruction. The mainstream literary establishment, educational institutions, and Hollywood successfully established Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin and related films as the generalized truth about slavery. In the 1960s, things begin to change for African American writers and the representation of slavery. In 1962, William Melvin Kelley in A Different Drummer revisited and reconfigured the enslaved African, giving him subjectivity and agency. In 1966, Margaret Walker published Jubilee, which is about her great-grandmother, who was a slave. In 1971, Ernest Gaines published The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, which is about a one-hundred-year-old Black woman who was born in slavery and had [End Page 253] lived to see the beginnings of the civil rights movement. With these texts, along with John O'Killen's Slaves (1969), Gayle Jones's Corregidora (1975), Ishmael Reed's Flight to Canada (1976), Alex Haley's Roots (1976), Octavia Butler's Kindred (1979), Charles Johnson's Oxherding Tale (1982) and Middle Passage (1990), Sherley Anne Williams's Dessa Rose (1986), Toni Morrison's Beloved (1987), Jewelle Gomez's The Gilda Stories (1991), J. California Cooper's In Search of Sale Factory (1994), Lorene Carey's The Price of the Child (1995), Lalita Tademy's Cane River (2000), Edward P. Jones's The Known World (2004), Lawrence Hill's The Book of Negroes (2007), Colson Whitehead's The Underground Railroad (2016), and Ta-Nehisi Coates's The Water Dancer (2019), slavery returned to the center of African American literature. Why were African American writers again writing slave narratives or novels about slavery? Was it the stories about slavery that their grandparents had passed down, as in the case of Walker's Jubilee? Was the new emphasis on slavery a result of the 1960s, which created a generation of African Americans who had "assessed and absorbed their history, and, in that tremendous action, ha[d] freed themselves of it and w[ould] never be victims again" (Baldwin 1997, 20), or who, in critically examining their history, had psychologically broken away and freed themselves from white hegemonic narratives about slavery (embodied in Stowe) and, therefore, could revisit the issue of slavery from a different space, giving them an understanding of their own power and agency? Seemingly, the 1960s produced a generation of African American historians, scholars and writers who revisited, dusted off, interrogated, and critically studied and reclaimed African and African American history, cultural traditions, and belief systems that had been denigrated, appropriated, omitted, and/or excluded by Western reason. But unlike normative American society, this generation viewed this history and these...

Note from the Editor

Note from the Editor Dr. Sandra G. Shannon The publication of issue 64.1 (March 2021) of the College Language Association Journal marks the end of my tenure as CLAJ Editor! I am especially pleased that the timing of my exit coincides with the journal's current on-time status, its increased global reach, and a checklist of other major enhancements. As I glance in the rear-view mirror, I am comforted in knowing that the vision I shared with then-CLA President Dr. Mario Chandler (2012-2014) in my October 12, 2013 acceptance has become reality in the impressive caliber, reach, and timeliness of scholarship that CLAJ currently publishes. Honored and optimistic that I could make a difference, I fully embraced this position, well aware of the weight of the journal's impressive history. I expressed as much in that email meant to assure Dr. Chandler and my CLA colleagues that I was up to the task: I have already begun to give some thought to how I'd like to see the journal advance and stay in step with the digital age as well as with the growing body of new literary works on the scene. I am particularly interested in striking a balance between critical essays on more established writers and providing a platform for the critical exploration of a new generation of intellectuals, activists, and creative thinkers. I could not help but notice that the most recent issue of CLAJ has two essays on Toni Morrison and one on Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin! I believe that CLAJ must reflect the vitality and fluidity in existing and emerging fields--in all genres. Mission accomplished! For evidence one need only peruse the succession of solid single and special issues published during my editorship. From issue 56.2 (December 2012) to issue 64.1 (March 2021), CLAJ boasts a long and distinguished line of CLA scholarly essays and creative work that speak to the accomplishments of literary giants gone too soon, to the pressing issues of our times, and to unexplored aspects of multiple "languages and literatures of Africa and its global diaspora." I am pleased to note that this trend toward cutting edge CLA scholarship continues with this current landmark special issue, Blackness and Disability: The Remix, edited by Dr. Therí Pickens. When I formally stepped into this role in January 2014, I knew that there would be no honeymoon and that there would be much work ahead. However, that work never quite seemed like work with the constant support of a stalwart [End Page 1] Editorial Board sharing the load. I am grateful for the efforts of each member who ably assisted me in lifting the profile of CLAJ. Finally, I wish my successor, Dr. Vershawn Young, great success at the helm of this venerable journal and pledge to offer my assistance as he navigates the newness of serving as Editor of the College Language Association Journal! [End Page 2] Dr. Sandra G. Shannon Howard University Editor@clascholars.org Copyright © 2016 College Language Association

Civil War Obscura: Uncle Tom's Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly.

"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's Uncle Tom's Cabin is still worth the read."

Love and Depth in the American Novel: From Stowe to James

Love and Depth in the American Novel: From Stowe to James

Herman Melville Among the Magazines by Graham Thompson

Reviewed by: Herman Melville Among the Magazines by Graham Thompson Robert J. Scholnick GRAHAM THOMPSON Herman Melville Among the Magazines Amherst and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2018. xiii + 249. In a 2008 article in American Periodicals on Charles Gordon Greene's Boston Post, I analyzed that influential Democratic daily's treatment of the three most prominent contemporary American novelists: Stowe, Hawthorne, and Melville. Although the Post was staunchly anti-abolitionist, it wrote positively of Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, so emotionally gripping did the reviewer find the novel. It also regularly praised Hawthorne's fiction and even went out of its way to boost his fortunes. For instance, in June 1849 it publicized his dramatic "beheading," when he lost his position as Custom House Surveyor in Salem following the ascension of the Whig administration. Melville, however, the paper attacked with unparalleled bitterness and gratuitous cruelty in a series of extensive reviews almost certainly written by Greene himself. Greene could not abide Melville's idiosyncratic style, his refusal to conform to the conventions of fiction as Greene understood them. He urged readers not to waste their money on Moby-Dick and condemned Pierre as "perhaps the craziest fiction extant," a work that "might be supposed to emanate from a lunatic hospital rather than from the quiet retreats of Berkshire. We say it with grief—it is too bad for Mr. Melville to abuse his really fine talents as he does." Melville was undaunted. Remarkably, as Graham Thompson shows in Herman Melville Among the Magazines, Melville followed the commercial failure of Pierre in 1852 by wisely turning to the expanding New York periodical marketplace. Beginning with the appearance of "Bartleby, the Scrivener" in Putnam's Monthly Magazine in November and December 1853, he published some fourteen tales and sketches in periodicals over the next several years. Here Melville found a large and appreciative readership, much larger than for his novels, and earned not-insignificant sums. In May 1856, he gathered six tales in a volume released by Dix and Edwards under the title The Piazza Tales. With the exception of the title piece, "The Piazza," written especially for the volume, all the stories had appeared in Putnam's, including such masterpieces as "Bartleby, the Scrivener," "Benito Cereno," and "The Encantadas." [End Page 151] Although the periodical marketplace had enabled Melville to resume his literary career, he withdrew from that marketplace after the appearance of The Piazza Tales, a critical but not a commercial success. "In financial terms," Thompson argues, "Melville would have benefitted from more, not less, magazine writing" (207). We do not know why Melville elected to cease writing for the magazines but, thanks to Herman Melville Among the Magazines, we can understand just how important the magazine culture of the 1850s was in shaping him as a writer who transformed the tropes and conventions of periodical publishing with "dazzling displays of innovation" (xi). Thompson argues that Melville's "embedding" in the periodical culture of New York became a necessary condition for the creation of his short fiction: "We can ask how our understanding of Melville's authorship changes when we press his writing back between the leaves of the magazines in which it was published. And we can do so without allowing magazine publication to delimit the possible answers" (19). Thompson's book raises a number of important questions, including just how we should understand the interaction between a periodical's editorial direction and the meaning of particular works that appear in its pages. The first chapter, "The Plain Facts of Paper," recounts Melville's visit to a paper mill in Dalton, Massachusetts, that gave rise to, among other works, "The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids." Eschewing what he calls an "allegorical reading" of this and other stories where paper figures prominently, Thompson emphasizes Melville's representation of the material reality of paper itself (39). He claims that in "Bartleby, the Scrivener," the title character's series of refusals to participate in the work of the law office "can be seen as an aversion not to the reading and writing that is the stuff of authorship but an aversion to interacting with paper itself" (41...

Slavery and Silence: Latin America and the U.S. Slave Debate by Paul D. Naish

Reviewed by: Slavery and Silence: Latin America and the U.S. Slave Debate by Paul D. Naish Jeffrey F. Taffet Paul D. Naish. Slavery and Silence: Latin America and the U.S. Slave Debate. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2017. The late Paul Naish argues that antebellum discussions about Latin America were a way to address slavery in the United States at a moment when intellectual and inclusive conversations about slavery were impossible. He suggests that despite extensive anti- and pro-slavery writings in this era, most this literature served, and was consumed by, people already committed to a particular view about human bondage. Authors, especially novelists and historians hoping for a broader audience, reflexively shied away from explicitly writing about slavery as a way of appealing to wider audiences. This was especially true, Naish contends, in the two decades preceding the publication of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852). Writers in the United States obviously appreciated that slavery was the essential question of the era however, and their stories and narratives about Latin America provided opportunities to present their ideas. His strongest chapter considers historian William Hickling Prescott, the author of three influential books about the Spanish conquest of the Americas. Prescott castigated the Spanish for their harsh treatment and enslavement of indigenous Americans, yet also cautioned that rapid change might lead to social disorder. To make this point, Prescott celebrates the Dominican priest, Bartolome de las Casas, for his abolitionist-like work in the early Spanish empire, but he also argued that las Casas, though "strongly on the ground of natural right … like some of the reformers of our day, disdained to calculate the consequences of carrying out the principle to its full and unqualified extent" (159). Naish suggests that Prescott's approach neatly reflected his New England whiggish instincts about the depravity of slavery as well as a belief in the wisdom of a slow and orderly march toward change. Naish also looks at slavery's defenders, carefully exploring the writings of a set of pseudo-Archeologists who proposed that Aztec cities and the extensive earthworks in the Ohio Valley were not built by indigenous peoples. Instead, Naish explains, they claimed that Europeans had arrived long before Columbus, and that Europeans were responsible for the construction of these grand projects. This argument [End Page 111] stemmed from views about race-based intellectual capabilities, and buffeted a position that slavery was a beneficial part of a biologically organized social system. Naish also demonstrates, effectively, that this position also muddled questions about indigenous and Mexican original land ownership; it eased a defense of westward expansion into the Ohio Valley and the taking of Mexico's territory in the settlement following the U. S. war on Mexico. More broadly, Naish explains how racial sentiments impacted political approaches to the rest of Latin America. In a lengthy early section, he explains that the simple question of whether to send a delegation to the 1826 Panama Convention of independent states in the Americas turned into a nasty congressional debate. Advocates for participation suggested that U. S. involvement would be a sign of goodwill and respect for these new nations, would signal an appreciation of common democratic values, and could help build trade relationships; opponents highlighted the evils of Catholicism and most pointedly noted that many Latin Americans, even among the elite, were multiracial. If U. S. representatives went to the conference they might sit next to, in the words of Virginia's John Randolph, "the mixed breeds, the Indians, and the half breeds" (qtd. in 31). Although the elements of Naish's arguments all work individually, taken together, the meaning of the larger picture is not always clear. A fundamental point, that conversations about Latin America, as a racial other, reflected internal views about race is somewhat obvious and has long been a subject of extensive scholarly attention. Naish seems to want to suggest, as his contribution to the scholarship, that this process happened in silence as the costs of addressing slavery and race were too high in the antebellum period. Yet in his examples, overt linkages between slavery and Latin America are abundant. Either the connections were made...

Women's Petitions and &lt;em&gt;The Linwoods&lt;/em&gt;

Women's Petitions and The Linwoods Amy Dunham Strand I have again come a petitioner to you," says republican heroine Isabella Linwood to the British military leader Sir Henry Clinton in Catharine Maria Sedgwick's historical romance The Linwoods (1835), highlighting Isabella's repeated role as a petitioner in the novel (275). In central scenes throughout The Linwoods, Isabella petitions Sir Henry, appealing with "due humility" to reunite the Linwood family (240), if not to free her patriot brother Herbert, imprisoned in New York while impetuously seeking reconciliation with their Loyalist father. Isabella's petitions simultaneously trace the constitution of her political convictions from tory to rebel. In turn, Sedgwick petitions her readers throughout her "humble story," echoing Isabella's goals of republican union and transformation for her own era (315). In a series of gendered political performances in The Linwoods, Sedgwick thus invokes a central genre informing mid-nineteenth-century American women's writing: the petition, or political prayer, often on behalf of others—and a foundational genre in Anglo-American jurisprudence, relying on conventions of humility and republicanism to express requests to government officials. In translating the petition's rhetorical conventions of humility and republicanism into The Linwoods with an eye to performances of gender, Sedgwick's fiction foregrounds the constitutive rhetorical production of both citizenship and womanhood in nineteenth-century America. In recent years, historical studies have underlined the importance of tropes of humility and republicanism in petitions by American women who "were clearly aware of gender categories in antebellum America that mapped gender onto the public/private distinction" such that "to petition Congress was, for many women of the early Republic, a calculated but significant political risk" (Carpenter and Moore 483). In the novel, Sedgwick is aware of the calculated risk of women's petitioning; consequently, as in antebellum women's petitioning, she invokes [End Page 181] the humble rhetoric of petitioning with strategic performances of gender to persuade her auditors while still embracing republican ideals, registering protest with the goal of union. In doing so, Sedgwick uses Isabella's petitions to imagine women's political agency and to cast her as a burgeoning model of female citizenship who could still, without losing womanly virtues, participate in the body politic. In petitions to readers, the narrator of The Linwoods does the same, performing gender conventions alongside petitioning's conventions, often to mitigate its potential political risk. Sedgwick is among several nineteenth-century women writers who discursively explore women's political agency through novel incorporations of such in-text, thematic petitions and extratextual, authorial petitions, such that the fictions themselves can be read as petitions to their readers that theorize women's political agency. Not only in The Linwoods, female heroines and their authors strategically recast the rhetoric of the petition—beseeching, appealing, or praying, in speech, writing, or action—to intervene in issues of justice and freedom and to become political actors in gender-inflected ways, as rhetorical situations demand. For instance, at the heart of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), Mrs. Bird petitions for escaped, potentially imprisoned slaves, challenging husband Senator Bird on the Fugitive Slave Law with a political prayer, as she "ruled [in her domestic sphere] more by entreaty and persuasion than by command or argument" (68; emphasis added). Mrs. Bird's spoken petition marks Senator Bird's political transformation, preparing him to receive the live, runaway Eliza at their door, with her own, embodied appeal in "the real presence of distress,—the imploring human eye, the frail, trembling human hand, the despairing appeal of helpless agony" (77; emphasis added). In E. D. E. N. Southworth's The Hidden Hand (1859), the popular heroine Capitola circulates a written petition for Black Donald, also unjustly imprisoned, and, when her conciliatory petition fails, Capitola resorts to action, a radical rescue of this prisoner. While these earlier fictions integrate women's petitioning rhetoric, by the time Rebecca Harding Davis published Life in the Iron-Mills (1861), women's petitioning had become so recognizable that it evolved into a figure sculpted of korl—a fully embodied visual representation of Davis's authorial petitions, direct sentimental appeals to her readers on the soul-starvation...

Feeling Right in The Ambassadors

Feeling Right in The Ambassadors Anne Langendorfer "Feeling right" was an important idea in nineteenth-century American literature, as many novels from Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852)1 to Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884)2 attest. But when in The Ambassadors (1903) James takes up this crucial phrase, he offers readers a new idea: that "feeling right" can be understood as the meeting point between emotion and ethics for both characters and readers. Throughout the novel, James shows the protagonist, Lambert Strether, struggling with the concept of "right" feeling: Strether "wanted to feel right about it, but could only, at best, for the time, feel vague" (315). Strether's desire to feel right opens a gaping vagueness, which leaves readers, too, feeling bewildered. In keeping readers close to Strether through the novel's focalization, James invites the authorial audience to consider not only characters' emotions and ethics but also their own emotions about and ethical judgments of these characters. In The Ambassadors, to feel right is neither a command to readers, as practiced by Stowe,3 nor an entirely ironic statement, as articulated by Twain, but rather a desire shared and interrogated by characters and readers alike. Indeed, both Stowe's and Twain's uses of the phrase "feeling right" leave behind a persistent question about the efficacy of sympathy: how far can sympathy take readers? In The Ambassadors, James offers readers an opportunity to engage with the notion of feeling right as an emotional process, focalizing the story through Strether's self-questioning dialogue with himself and therefore suggesting that a specific and complex affective education is required of characters and readers in order for anyone to make claims about right feeling. More broadly, I argue, James's concept of emotion is tied to a larger emotional-ethical conversation in the late nineteenth century about the nature of "feeling right" and how one achieves this condition through reading.4 As Faye Halpern proposes in her clever and generative 2018 investigation of James's meditation on sentimentality in The Bostonians, James is not as dismissive of sentimentality as many critics have argued and indeed is deeply engaged with it. [End Page 251] Halpern suggests that the sentimental novel's reading practice of cultivating readers' sympathetic identification with characters is important in James's work, even as it is often replaced in James's novels by "a love of difficulty, a toleration of ambiguity, and judgment borne of critical distance" (63). In Emotional Reinventions: Realist-Era Representations Beyond Sympathy (2015), Melanie Dawson argues that James and other realist authors have moved "beyond sympathy" toward the act of analyzing and cataloging emotion (103). I agree with Halpern and Dawson that James's novels portray emotion differently and therefore create different reading experiences, refusing readers easy sympathetic identification with protagonists like Lambert Strether. But how then do we feel about Strether? His desire to feel right encourages readers to engage with a sustained feeling of affection for the difficulty, ambiguity, and judgment-making process with which James requires readers to engage. If Strether's own right feeling is achieved only through a novel-long process of emotional-ethical change, then we must also attend to the ways in which this process affects readers. Emotion and ethics work together in The Ambassadors to encourage readers to engage ambivalent emotional responses, as Kate Stanley and Joshua Held suggest. In this short essay, I suggest a rhetorical narrative approach that combines ethics with emotion, yielding new insights for understanding James's complex communication to his authorial audience. Given the space limitations, I will offer (drawing on James Phelan's work in Experiencing Fiction) an overarching sketch of the narrative progression from the global instability to key complication to resolution, focusing on the complexities of the ending, to describe this process. I use this framework of narrative progression to insist on the importance of seeing the interactions between the judgments of characters and the authorial audience as integral to understanding the reading experience as one attuned to a skeptical engagement with Strether's understanding of himself as, finally, not only feeling but being right. Narrative Progression and Instabilities: Knowledge, Ethics...

The Year in Conferences—2018

The Year in Conferences—2018 Rachel Linnea Brown (bio), Ryan Charlton (bio), Amy Huang (bio), Joshua Tuttle (bio), Susanna Compton Underland, Senior Advisor (bio), Marla Anzalone (bio), Elizabeth Boyle (bio), Rachael Dewitt (bio), Jenessa Kenway (bio), Regina Yoong (bio), Kacie Fodness, Senior Advisor (bio), Brittany Biesiada (bio), Hannah Champion (bio), Jane Fleming (bio), Seth Spencer (bio), Regina Yoong Yui Jien (bio), and Gia Coturri Sorenson, Senior Advisor (bio) The "Year in Conferences" (YiC) accelerates the circulation of ideas among scholars by covering the field's major conferences. Graduate students from across the country collaboratively author an article that appears annually in ESQ's first issue. Now in its tenth year, this report includes C19, ALA, and SSAWW. c19, 22–25 march 2018, albuquerque, new mexico The Society of Nineteenth-Century Americanists (C19) held its biennial conference in Albuquerque, New Mexico, in March 2018. The conference theme was "Climate," an especially prescient designation given that inclement weather thwarted many participants' travel plans. But conversations at C19 were not limited to the weather: panels and roundtables undertook such wide-ranging concerns as ecology and science; the Anthropocene and literary periodization; and race, gender, and the body politic. Many critical threads led to political conclusions as the current cultural climate motivated speakers to consider how nineteenth-century legacies might illuminate our present moment. This frame prompted self-reflective practices: In what ways does our field need to change? How can we accommodate more voices, encourage interdisciplinarity, and decenter the United States in our understanding of what we mean by American? [End Page 109] At the plenary event, "C19 Now!," Jenni Monet spoke about Indigenous activism at Standing Rock and her experiences as a journalist covering "Indian Country." Monet stressed her dual identity as an expert and an activist. In many ways, expertise and activism were C19's twin discourses, whether panelists approached climate through the archive, the body, materiality, form, space, race, or performance. Program link: http://programme.exordo.com/c19conference2018/ reconsidering nineteenth-century archives and histories Panelists critically interrogated physical, temporal, and linguistic boundaries associated with diverse histories and archives. In doing so, they blurred conventional categorizations and offered new models for assessing nineteenth-century expertise and activism. Roundtable presentations for "Beyond Early, Beyond American" addressed temporal distinctions by questioning the meanings of early and American and exploring what story such literary periodization tells. Hester Blum considered the Anthropocene and noted possible start dates of 1610, the Industrial Revolution, and 1945. Blum pointed out that in the context of deep or geologic time, these dates do not register as far apart. Similarly, the terms Early Americanist and nineteenth centuryist become less distinct within this scope. But if everything is about deep time, she concluded, do we then lose particular political contexts? Marissa López similarly questioned the connotations of early American, pointing out that early resonates only if by America we mean United States. This formulation, she argued, perpetuates a colonial identity and national framework. Phillip Round specifically explored Mississippian contexts for this field of study, thus embodying [End Page 110] López's aim for early American scholars to decenter colonial narratives. Round contended that by engaging archaeological material and visualizing America in new ways—for example, with a map of Missouri River drainage—we can understand how Indigenous peoples have shaped global history. Sandra Gustafson considered a different global history through the legacy of Republican thought in texts such as Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), Herman Melville's "Bartleby the Scrivener" (1853), and Upton Sinclair's The Jungle (1906). Extending the examination of early and American, several panelists considered how this debate intersects with issues of narration, genre, and discipline. Michelle Burnham employed a model from Nicholas Paige's Before Fiction: The Ancien Régime of the Novel (2011) to question the patterns we assume exist in early American literature. Patterns of genre formulation, for example, are based on our knowledge of what is to come rather than what might exist beneath the surface of earlier eras, Burnham asserted. Honorée Fanonne Jeffers described how poetry and politics intersect for her scholarship and pedagogy. Though some students resist discussions about slavery in creative writing courses, she...

Into The Thickets Of Theory And Woods of Reform

Into The Thickets Of Theory And Woods of Reform Ronald G. Walters (bio) Philip F. Gura. Man's Better Angels: Romantic Reformers and the Coming of the Civil War. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2017. 315 pp. Notes and index. $29.95. Mark J. Miller. Cast Down: Abjection in America, 1700–1850. Philadelphia, PA. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016. 240 pp. Illustrations, notes, and index. $49.95. The roads are twisting that bring together the two books reviewed here. Professor Mark J. Miller's, Cast Down, Abjection in America, 1700–1850, traces the psychological state of "abjection" as its forms and effects manifested and changed in America between 1700 and 1850. This rough chronology begins with trans-Atlantic revivalism and Jonathan Edwards in the 1720s and concludes with Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, or, Life among the Lowly (1852), followed by an "Epilogue" featuring Herman Melville's Cabin Boy character, Pip, and the concept of "Oriental Blackness." The chronological scope of Professor Philip F. Gura's Man's Better Angels: Romantic Reformers and the Coming of the Civil War is less sweeping. It runs from the financial Panic of 1837 to John Brown's botched raid in the fall of 1859 and the nation's subsequent slide into the horror of the Civil War. Miller's road is a bit bumpy and a wilder ride, but the authors' books converge in three important respects. Each develops a provocative critique of antebellum American reform, focuses on a mental state, and comes to his subject from a background in historically engaged literary scholarship. Their perspectives on history, however, differ, and in Miller's case, differ from those of many historians. Novel perspectives can be a good thing for those of us looking for new ways of thinking about antebellum reform and American social movements more broadly. Or they can goad us to think more deeply about why we do things the way we do. I will begin by taking a closer look with Man's Better Angels, a readable and thought-provoking assessment of antebellum reformers and their place in the march into Civil War. It is beautifully written and challenging in its central [End Page 406] argument, which focuses on a style of reform Gura calls "romantic" that took hold among "influential antebellum reformers who had been indelibly affected by economic dislocation" that the Panic of 1837 created "and thereupon galvanized to lives of reform" (p. 13). Gura faults "romantic reformers" for a "misguided faith in human nature" (p. 266). This faith inspired a diverse cohort of reformers to present "imaginative, if frequently specious, ways for Americans to think about how, by improving certain aspects of their personal lives, they could make themselves better, more productive, and potentially successful citizens" (p. 11). By this logic, if the question posed by an antebellum would-be reformer was "if I want to change the world, where do I start?" the answer from seasoned romantic reformers would be "with yourself." In the case of some antebellum reform movements, such as the water cure and phrenology, the beginning would be with you, the seeker, paying me, the reformer, to lead you to self-reform. That self-improvement model comes with costs. From the beginning, the task Professor Gura set for himself faced potential stumbling-blocks. The first was in selection of representative reformers to give flesh to his argument. The second was stylistic—how to tell, without redundancy, the stories of the seven different people he chose, all keyed to Panic of 1837, the economic and cultural scars it left, and the style of reform it fostered? He handled both problems deftly and not always predictably. In his roll call of antebellum reformers, several of the usual suspects are missing, with two exceptions. Among those not represented are William Lloyd Garrison, the Grimké sisters, Theodore Dwight Weld, Wendell Phillips, Sojourner Truth, Frederick Douglass and other familiar abolitionists. Instead, we have Henry David Thoreau—whose credentials as a reformer are debatable—and John Brown as the end points. They are preceded in separate chapters featuring five lesser-known figures, ones not usually thought of as making the A-list of antebellum reformers. Gura...

Free Love Among the Ruins

In the month following the publication of Hawthorne's The Blithedale Romance, a reviewer in the Oneida Circular (11 August 1852) was struck by the tragedy of Zenobia and Priscilla, both in love with the same man. In "The Romance of Disappointment," the reviewer notes that these love triangles are common in American life: Society is pretty thoroughly streaked with just such double loving and disappointment. ... It seems to us a better solution of this common problem might be found. The fact that nature permits and ordains the coinciding love of two persons for another, is evidence that there is some way for its innocent and harmonious adjustment, without the horrible duel that is involved in the single marriage of one of them. (158) The Oneida community, founded in 1848 by John Humphrey Noyes, had already proposed complex marriage as an "innocent and harmonious adjustment" for such competing desires. Polyamory may have been a fleeting fever-dream for Miles Coverdale in his tree turret, but then it was a complicated reality for free love communities like Oneida. In recent years, queer theorists have taken interest in the fluid eroticism of The Blithedale Romance: scholars such as Kent Bales, Benjamin Scott Grossberg and David Greven have argued that the novel represents Hawthorne's own polyamorous fantasies, his critique of traditional gender roles, or both. (1) However, these queer readings of the novel have not been fully historicized within the context of the nineteenth-century free-love movement. (2) When Hawthorne wrote The Blithedale Romance, he was less weighing in on socialism as entering a transatlantic debate on the future of love and marriage: Hawthorne chose to explore spiritual affinities rather than hard realities, the erotics rather than the logistics of a Utopian community. (3) My article situates The Blithedale Romance within a transatlantic web of influences, from Utopian socialists like Fourier and Horace Greeley to feminists like Margaret Fuller and Harriet Martineau, from bachelor-heroes like Wilhelm Meister and Ik Marvel to free lovers like Noyes and George Sand. In particular, the erotic dimensions of Hawthorne's romance require that our interpretations of Zenobia must move beyond the feminism of Margaret Fuller to consider the free love of George Sand. Within this context, I argue that The Blithedale Romance is, in fact, more radical than it first appears: despite his sexual conservatism, Hawthorne aligned his novel with the concerns of free-love activists, particularly on the subject of marriage. (4) As the reviewer in the Oneida Circular suggests with his title, Hawthorne's Utopian novel is a "romance of disappointment," be the love free or fettered by matrimony. At its publication, Hawthorne's Blithedale was placed alongside a transatlantic array of reform novels. In his review "A Socialist Romance in America" (December 1852), the French critic Emile Monegut compared the romance to Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, several British works about the "condition of the English working or rural classes," and William Godwin's political novels (129). However, if some critics believed Blithedale to be a straight reform novel, they were often disappointed. In the Boston Daily Times (21 July 1852), Charles C. Hazewell asked, "Why Brook Farm? The romance of the story has as much to do with liquor-selling as socialism," while a reviewer presumed to be George Eliot wrote in the Westminster Review (October 1852) that "the frame of socialism is not well-fitted to Zenobia's story, the two do not mix, and Socialism is entangled in responsibilities for which it is never truly responsible" (129). In staging the romance at a socialist community but not focusing on socialism, The Blithedale Romance irritated many realist critics: why would Hawthorne choose such a subject--modern, political, quasi-auto-biographical--and then inject it with a melodramatic love story, full of Gothic flourishes? …

Seriality and Susanna Rowson's &lt;em&gt;Sincerity&lt;/em&gt;

Seriality and Susanna Rowson's Sincerity Karen A. Weyler What makes a work teachable? How do we prepare students to read early American authors and genres when virtually everything we will teach in such a course will be unfamiliar to them? Sheridan Blau, in The Literature Workshop, argues that one of the secrets to engaging teaching is providing enough context so that students can comprehend a work, without offering so much that we substitute lecture for student engagement and discovery. He uses the example of Randall Jarrell's "The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner." With direct knowledge of World War II receding into the distant past, this splendid poem hovers on the edge of legibility for many students; absent knowledge that men operating machine guns were confined to the claustrophobic spaces of a ball turret for the duration of an airplane flight, students produce wildly creative but ultimately frustrating misinterpretations of "wet fur" and "black flak" (qtd. in Blau 191).1 With this question of context in mind, how can we prepare students to read early serial fiction? And perhaps even more to the point, why would we want to teach serial fiction, when there are perfectly good reprint editions of early American novels that provide, in a single volume, the kind of textual infrastructure to which our students are accustomed: a unified, coherent text; footnotes; chronologies; author biographies; critical responses; and the like. In reading serial fiction, we give up these conveniences and create conditions that encourage students to teach themselves and to apply knowledge they have acquired in other contexts. Susanna Rowson's 1803–4 novel Sincerity dramatically and memorably animates the persistent inequalities faced by women and poor people in Anglo-American culture and the physical, social, and mental costs of living up to unattainable early-nineteenth-century feminine ideals. Moreover, teaching Sincerity as a text-in-parts encourages students to engage in metacognitive thinking about their reading experiences: it encourages them to think beyond the plot and reflect on reading as a process. Our class discussions thus oscillated between two central issues: interpreting how parts of Sincerity were embedded within multiple contexts, and interpreting how temporalities of reading shape interpretation. In this essay I will first explore why the novel-as-material-book has held a privileged status in American literary studies and what we might gain by moving beyond that model; then I will discuss how [End Page 162] teaching Sincerity with an emphasis on seriality facilitated student engagement in primary research and encouraged them to bring their own experiences as consumers of serial works to bear upon an early American literary text. privileging the book Scholars of British literature have historically been more attentive than scholars of American literature to the serial publication of long fiction, particularly with respect to Charles Dickens's work in magazines and standalone serials and to the triple-decker novels that were so popular among private subscription-based circulating libraries. By contrast, the serial novel receiving the greatest attention in nineteenth-century US literature is Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, even though that text is more likely to be discussed as a unified novel than as a serial. Fiction in serial format formed an essential component of post-Revolutionary magazine culture. As Jared Gardner has pointed out, the two most prolific novelists of the early republic, Susanna Rowson and Charles Brockden Brown, ended their careers writing not standalone novels but periodical pieces, as did Isaiah Thomas and Judith Sargent Murray (140–41). The largely anonymous, more responsive, and more democratic form of the magazine clearly appealed to writers as well as readers. Why, then, has early US serial fiction—specifically early-nineteenth-century magazine fiction—received markedly less attention than its British counterparts? This critical lacuna has been created partly by technological factors and by the reciprocal relationship between teaching and literary scholarship in the field of American literature. For most of the twentieth century, early American sentimental fiction—and it is fair to assert that while sentimentality is not the only mode in early American fiction, it predominates—was dismissed as sub-literary. The rise of feminist criticism, reader-response criticism, New Historicism, and...

The Representation of the African American as Colonial Oppressed in Texts of the Soviet Interwar Years

The article provides an overview of the representation of the African American in Soviet publications, looking both at works by Soviet writers and at works by African Americans. It discusses an evolution in the representation of both Africans and African Americans in published texts from prerevolutionary exoticist conventions, as in Pierre Loti, or emphasis on their spirituality, as in Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, to emphasizing their debased position and the class nature of their oppression. The article discusses the impact of developments in Soviet policies and ideology on this evolution, such as the “Black Belt” doctrine of the Comintern, and traces their impact in works by Claude McKay and Richard Wright, and also in the travelogues of Soviet visitors to the United States, such as Boris Pil'niak, and Il'ia Il'f and Evgeny Petrov.

Cultural approach: A potential pedagogy for promoting learners’ insights into cultural aspects in literary works

This study would attempt to ascertain the truly inseparable relation between culture (Geert Hofstede, 1997), and literature (Nguyen V.D., 2001) and investigate a potential pedagogy to promote learners' insights into cultural aspects found in literary works. It is a descriptive research which comprises a variety of authors' viewpoints about the relation of culture and literature, what the cultural approach or New Historicism (Ann B. Dobie's book, 2001) is, and the analysis of the three selected American stories, namely Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1853), Kate Chopin's The Awakening (1921) and William Faulkner's A Rose for Emily (1930), based on cultural lens. This study also might encourage the application of a cultural approach as a potential pedagogy (Pham T,Vu L.H &amp; Nguyen N,H, 2001). The research would inspire teachers to conduct further research to test both the effectiveness of this approach in teaching literature and the learners' attitudes towards it as well.

Practicing Democracy: Popular Politics in the United States from the Constitution to the Civil War ed. by Daniel Peart and Adam I. P. Smith

Practicing Democracy: Popular Politics in the United States from the Constitution to the Civil War. Edited by Daniel Peart and Adam I. P. Smith. (Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2015. Pp. [viii], 296. $49.50, ISBN 978-0-8139-3770-0.) The ten (all male) authors in this volume met at conference at University College London in 2011 to reexamine well-worn questions of political engagement, development, and democratization in the first seventy-two years of U.S. history. Taken together, the essays they produced show early American political history to be vibrant field, capable of providing fresh insights. Editors Daniel Peart and Adam I. P. Smith set an ambitious agenda for the volume, to chart the among citizens, parties, and governance in the period by building on insights from political science, from the political history of the 1960s and 1970s, and from the new, new political history of the 1990s and early 2000s (p. 11). The essays revise ideas about foundational issues: the relationship between Jeffersonian and Jacksonian politics; the push-pull relationship between political parties and voter turnout; and the interaction between parties, those in government power, and broader public. The essays in Part 1 focus on political development, even while sometimes resisting stable model of developing systems. Douglas Bradburn uses the concept of path dependence to examine the origins of two-party conflict in the early republic. Reeve Huston reexamines Ronald P. Formisano's The Transformation of Political Culture: Massachusetts Parties, 1790s-1840s (New York, 1983) in light of more recent work that shows high activity in the 1790s to argue that the true origin of parties should be located in that decade, rather than in the Jacksonian period, even as state and local politics reveal an uneven pattern of democratization. Huston contends that Martin Van Buren may have invented discipline, but he did not innovate in most other functions. John L. Brooke's excellent essay follows up on his widely influential work on the public sphere by examining the early 1850s as a liminal, revolutionary rupture that hurried the onset of the Civil War as transformative event-clusters ... [reshaped] foundational myths and challenged social, political, and cultural structures (pp. 74, 75). He argues, in part, that the Civil War was hastened when party managers lost their power to control events because of cultural factors such as the publication of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) (p. 77). The essays in Part 2 add nuance to the wearing-thin battle over whether voter turnout was high or low in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. …

On the Novel and Civic Myth

On the Novel and Civic Myth