Beyond Uncle Tom’s Cabin

Sylvia Mayer is chair of American studies and Anglophone literatures and cultures at the University of Bayreuth, Germany. Monika Mueller is senior lecturer of American literature and culture at the University of Stuttgart, Germany.

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 United States. The essays in the first part of Beyond Uncle Tom's Cabin 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's Pink 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's Lady 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's The Minister's Wooing Chapter 7 Chapter Six: Kitchen Hierarchies: Negotiations of American Nationhood in Harriet Beecher Stowe's Oldtown Folks Chapter 8 Chapter Seven: New England Tempests? Harriet Beecher Stowe's The Minister's Wooing and The Pearl of Orr's Island Chapter 9 Chapter Eight: Ecstasy in Excess: Mysticism, Hysteria, and Masculinity in Harriet Beecher Stowe's Dred Chapter 10 Chapter Nine: Harriet Beecher Stowe's Marianettes: Reconstruction of Womanhood in The Minister's Wooing and Agnes 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's My Wife and I and We and Our Neighbors Chapter 13 Notes on Contributors Chapter 14 Index