Beyond Uncle Tom’s Cabin

Ever since feminist scholarship began to reintroduce Harriet Beecher Stowe's writings to the American Literary canon in the 1970s, critical interest in her work has steadily increased. Beyond Uncle Tom's Cabin: The Writings of Harriet Beecher Stowe, edited by Sylvia Mayer and Monika Mueller, shows that during her long writing and publishing career, Stowe was a highly prolific writer who targeted diverse audiences, dealt with drastically changing economic, commercial, and cultural contexts, and wrote in a diversity of genres.

Ever since feminist scholarship began to reintroduce Harriet Beecher Stowe's writings to the American Literary canon in the 1970s, critical interest in her work has steadily increased. Rediscovery and ultimate canonization, however, have concentrated to a large extent on her major novelistic achievement, Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852). Only in recent years have critics begun to focus more seriously on the wide variety of her work and started to create knowledge that broadens our understanding. Beyond Uncle Tom's Cabin: The Writings of Harriet Beecher Stowe, edited by Sylvia Mayer and Monika Mueller, shows that during her long writing and publishing career, Stowe was a highly prolific writer who targeted diverse audiences, dealt with drastically changing economic, commercial, and cultural contexts, and wrote in a diversity of genres. Reflecting a recent trend to move Stowe's other texts to the fore, the essays collected in this volume thus go beyond the critical focus on Uncle Tom's Cabin. They focus on several of Stowe's other texts that have also significantly contributed to American literary and cultural history, among them her New England novels, her New York City novels, and her fictional writings on religious differences between Europe and the U.S. The essays in the first part of Beyond Uncle Tom's Cabin: The Writings of Harriet Beecher Stowe concentrate on Stowe's language use, her rhetoric and choices of narrative technique and style, while the essays in the second part concentrate on thematic issues such as the representation of race, ethnicity, and religion, her participation in the emerging environmentalist movement, and Stowe's response to major economic shifts after the Civil War.

Chapter 1 Introduction
Chapter 2 Chapter One: The American Woman Movement Meets the Disingenuous Orator: Harriet Beecher Stowe'sPink and White Tyranny
Chapter 3 Chapter Two:Pink and White Tyranny and Harriet Beecher Stowe's Ambivalent Views on Authorship
Chapter 4 Chapter Three: The Wild and Distracted Call for Proof: Harriet Beecher Stowe'sLady Byron Vindicated and the Rise of Professional Realism
Chapter 5 Chapter Four: Gendering Gilded Age Periodical Professionalism: Reading Harriet Beecher Stowe's Hearth and Home Prescriptions for Women's Writing
Chapter 6 Chapter Five: The "Least Drop of Oil": Locating Narrative Authority in Harriet Beecher Stowe'sThe Minister's Wooing
Chapter 7 Chapter Six: Kitchen Hierarchies: Negotiations of American Nationhood in Harriet Beecher Stowe'sOldtown Folks
Chapter 8 Chapter Seven: New EnglandTempests? Harriet Beecher Stowe'sThe Minister's Wooing andThe Pearl of Orr's Island
Chapter 9 Chapter Eight: Ecstasy in Excess: Mysticism, Hysteria, and Masculinity in Harriet Beecher Stowe'sDred
Chapter 10 Chapter Nine: Harriet Beecher Stowe's Marianettes: Reconstruction of Womanhood inThe Minister's Wooing andAgnes of Sorrento
Chapter 11 Chapter Ten: Mapping the Environmental Ethical Dimension in Harriett Beecher Stowe's New England Novels
Chapter 12 Chapter Eleven: To Market! Consuming Women in Harriett Beecher Stowe'sMy Wife and I andWe and Our Neighbors
Chapter 13 Notes on Contributors
Chapter 14 Index