The Cambridge Companion to Harriet Beecher Stowe

The Cambridge Companion to Harriet Beecher Stowe establishes new parameters for both scholarly and classroom discussion of 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 CAMBRIDGE COMPANION TO
HARRIET BEECHER STOWE

EDITED BY

CINDY WEINSTEIN
California Institute of Technology

PUBLISHED BY THE PRESS SYNDICATE OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE
The Pitt Building, Trumpington Street, Cambridge, United Kingdom

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS
The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge, CB2 2RU, UK
40 West 20th Street, New York, NY 10011–4211, USA
477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, VIC 3207, Australia
Ruiz de Alarcón 13, 28014 Madrid, Spain
Dock House, The Waterfront, Cape Town 8001, South Africa

http://www.cambridge.org

© Cambridge University Press 2004

This book is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception
and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements,
no reproduction of any part may take place without
the written permission of Cambridge University Press.

First published 2004

Printed in the United Kingdom at the University Press, Cambridge

Typeface Sabon 10/13 pt.   System LATEX 2_e   [TB]

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 0 521 82592 X hardback
ISBN 0 521 53309 0 paperback

CONTENTS

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

GILLIAN BROWN is Professor of English and American Studies at the University of Utah. She is the author of Domestic Individualism: Imagining Self in Nineteenth-Century America (California, 1990) and The Consent of the Governed: The Lockean Legacy in Eighteenth-Century American Culture (Harvard, 2001). She is now working on two books: In the Name of the Child, a study of childhood and American literature, and Books without Borders, a study of the rise of children’s literature.

LAWRENCE BUELL is Powell M. Cabot Professor of American Literature at Harvard University and author, among other books, of New England Literary Culture: From Revolution Through Renaissance (Cambridge, 1986) and Emerson (Harvard, 2003).

GREGG CRANE is Associate Professor of English at the University of Michigan. He is the author of Race, Citizenship, and Law in American Literature (Cambridge, 2002).

AUDREY FISCH is Associate Professor of English and Coordinator of Secondary English Education at New Jersey City University. She is the co-editor of The Other Mary Shelley: Beyond Frankenstein (Oxford, 1993) and the author of American Slaves in Victorian England: Abolitionist Politics in Popular Literature and Culture (Cambridge, 2000).

MICHAEL T. GILMORE is the Paul Prosswimmer Professor of American Literature at Brandeis University. A contributor to the Cambridge History of American Literature, his books include American Romanticism and the Marketplace (Chicago, 1985) and Surface and Depth: The Quest for Legibility in American Culture (Oxford, 2003).

CAROLYN L. KARCHER is the author of Shadow over the Promised Land: Slavery, Race, and Violence in Melville’s America (Baton Rouge, 1980) and The First Woman in the Republic: A Cultural Biography of Lydia Maria Child (Duke, 1994). Her other publications include A Lydia Maria Child Reader (Duke, 1997) and scholarly editions of Child’s Hobomok and other Writings on Indians (Rutgers, 1986) and An Appeal in Favor of that Class of Americans Called Africans (Massachusetts, 1996) and of Catharine Maria Sedgwick’s Hope Leslie (Penguin, 1998). She is currently collecting material for an anthology cum critical study of nineteenth-century American women’s journalism.

JUDIE NEWMAN MA (Edinburgh) 1972, MA Edinburgh (1974), PhD (Cambridge) 1982. Founding fellow of the English Association, Academician, Academy of Social Sciences, Professor of American Studies, University of Nottingham.

SAMUEL OTTER is Associate Professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of Melville’s Anatomies (California, 1999) and currently is writing a book on race, manners, violence, and freedom between the Constitution and the Civil War, entitled Philadelphia Stories.

MARJORIE PRYSE is Professor of English and Women’s Studies and Chair of the Department of Women’s Studies at the University at Albany, State University of New York. She has written extensively on regionalism in American fiction. Her most recent publication is Writing out of Place: Regionalism, Women, and American Literary Culture, co-authored with Judith Fetterley (Illinois, 2003). This critical book, along with the collection, American Women Regionalists 1850–1910: A Norton Anthology, co-edited with Judith Fetterley (Norton, 1992), places Stowe early in the tradition of literary regionalism.

RONALD G. WALTERS is Professor of History at the Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of The Anti-slavery Appeal: American Abolitionism after 1830 (Johns Hopkins, 1976, paperback ed.: W. W. Norton, 1984), and American Reformers: 1815–1860 (Hill and Wang, 1978, revised ed. 1997). He is also the editor of three books, including Primers for Prudery: Sexual Advice to Victorian America (Prentice–Hall, 1974, new ed., with additional material, 2000). At present, he is working on a history of twentieth-century American popular culture.

KENNETH W. WARREN teaches English at the University of Chicago. He is the author of So Black and Blue: Ralph Ellison and the Occasion of Criticism (Chicago, 2003) and Black and White Strangers: Race and American Literary Realism (Chicago, 1993).

CINDY WEINSTEIN is Associate Professor of Literature at the California Institute of Technology. She is the author of The Literature of Labor and the Labors of Literature: Allegory in Nineteenth-Century American Fiction (Cambridge, 1995) and Family, Kinship, and Sympathy in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (Cambridge, forthcoming).

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

It’s been my privilege and pleasure to edit this volume. I would like to thank Ray Ryan, editor at Cambridge University Press, for inviting me to take on this project and helping see it to completion.

   The contributors of this Companion have given me an experience of intellectual partnership of the best kind. For their intelligence, diligence, enthusiasm, and timeliness, they have my deepest appreciation. Thanks to the Harriet Beecher Stowe Society, the American Literature Association, and the Harriet Beecher Stowe Center in Hartford for the chance to present this project while in progress. Molly Hiro’s research assistance has been invaluable. I am grateful to Jean Ensminger, Susan Davis, and Margaret Lindstrom of the Caltech division of humanities and social sciences for providing crucial support. I would also like to thank the following people for advice and encouragement: Jim Astorga, Gregg Crane, William Merrill Decker, Michael Gilmore, Dori Hale, Joan Hedrick, Catherine Jurca, Robert Levine, Samuel Otter, Mac Pigman, Stephen Railton, Eric Sundquist, and John Sutherland.

CHRONOLOGY