Product Description: No play in the history of the American Stage has been as ubiquitous and as widely viewed as Uncle Tom's Cabin . This book traces the major dramatizations of Stowe's classic from its inception in 1852 through modern versions on film...read more

Product Description: Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel was the critical event of literature and race relations in nineteenth century America. No other event had such an impact upon the slavery issue. While Mrs. Stowe wrote the weekly installments (a long serial in an antislavery paper) of Uncle Tom's Cabin she was living in genteel poverty, the harassed mother of six married to a scholarly but impractical man...read more

Product Description: Drawing upon the philosophical theories of William James, Dewey, and Mead and focusing upon major works by Whitman, Stein, Howells, Dreiser, and Henry James, Anthony Hilfer explores how these authors have structured their characters' consciousness, their purpose in doing so, and how this presentation controls the reader's moral response...read more

Product Description: W. D. Howells (1837-1920) occupies a peculiar position in our current literary history. Situated on the periphery, he is one of whose "marginality" seems, nevertheless, to be a necessary counterpart to the "centrality" of other writers―such as his friends Henry James and mark Twin―who are more securely fixed in the canon...read more

Product Description: From the eighteenth century on, appeals to listeners’ and readers’ feelings about the sufferings of slaves were a predominant strategy of abolitionism. This book argues that expressions of feeling in those texts did not just appeal to individual readers’ inclinations to sympathy but rather were inherently political...read more

A critical biography of the controversial literary figure of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, written before his death. This early appreciation of Howells not only studied his techniques and philosophy but also defended him against British criticism and supported him as an exponent of American thought, manners, and character.

What is the matter with the women in Henry James? In The Portrait of a Lady, The Wings of the Dove, and his short story The Altar of the Dead, one woman returns to a monster of a husband, another dies rather than confront the truth of her lover s engagement, while yet another stakes her all on having a candle lit for a dead lover, only to promptly reject it. Exploring these strange choices, Sigi Jottkandt argues that the singularity of these acts lies in their ethical nature, and that the ethical principle involved cannot be divorced from the question of aesthetics. She combines close readings of James with suggestive tours through Kantian aesthetics and set theory to uncover the aesthetic underpinning of the Lacanian ethical act, which has been largely overlooked in the current drive to discover a Cartesian origin for the subject as the subject of science."

Product Description: White Liberal Identity, Literary Pedagogy, and Classic American Realism brings literary works from the turn of the last century face to face with some of the dilemmas and paradoxes that currently define white liberal identity in the United States...read more

Titled after "Tom-Mania," the name a British newspaper gave to the international sensation attending the 1852 novel Uncle Tom's Cabin, this study looks anew at the novel and the songs, plays, sketches, translations, and imitations it inspired. In particular, Sarah Meer shows how the theatrical mode of blackface minstrelsy, the slavery question, and America's emerging cultural identity affected how Uncle Tom's Cabin was read, discussed, dramatized, merchandized, and politicized here and abroad. Until Uncle Tom's Cabin, Meer says, little truly common ground existed on which the United States and Britain could debate slavery. In addition to cutting across class, gender, and national lines, the novel tapped into a huge, preexisting transatlantic appetite for blackface performance. Even as it condemned slavery, however, Uncle Tom's Cabin was ambiguous about racial equality, and it portrayed blacks in demeaning ways. This gave copycat novels and minstrel stagings leeway to stray from Harriet Beecher Stowe's intentions. Minstrel-show versions in particular had a huge influence on later incarnations of the Uncle Tom story, converting the character into "a comic, or worse, a proslavery stooge" - a scorned figure in our popular memory. To look at how and why Uncle Tom's Cabin "both advocated emancipation and licensed a plethora of racist imitators," Meer places it in the context of contemporary minstrel sketches, melodramas, songs, jokes, newspaper commentaries, slave narratives, travel writing, proslavery novels, and even Uncle Tom merchandise like china figurines and wall-paper. She goes on to discuss Harriet Beecher Stowe's travelogue Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands and her second novel, Dred. The publication of each unleashed the political energies of Uncle Tom's Cabin and its revisions yet again.

Product Description: The writings and life of Flannery O’Connor (1925–1964) have enjoyed considerable attention both from admirers of her work and from scholars. In this distinctive book, Susan Srigley charts new ground in revealing how O’Connor’s ethics are inextricably linked to her role as a storyteller, and how her moral vision is expressed through the dramatic narrative of her fiction...read more

Traces the process and influences behind the writing of Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel, Uncle Tom's Cabin, which was published when the nation was torn over the issue of slavery and headed toward Civil War.

Product Description: First published in book form in 1852, Uncle Tom's Cabin quickly became a bestseller, recognised as a powerful contribution to anti-slavery debates. After more than 150 years, it remains one of the most widely discussed works of American literature...read more

Product Description: To prepare for the Other: this is the mission of ethics. Future Present: Ethics and/as Science Fiction fuses contemporary philosophy from Heidegger, Derrida, Levinas, and others with cultural texts preoccupied with the future arrival of an Other: science fiction...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: A collection of reflections on the place where religion and literature meet. Designed for classroom use and written for general readers.

Product Description: "Persuasive, instructive, and revisionary. Serves as complementary, complicating, or corrective to much of the scholarship on Melville, especially to very recent scholarship. . . . I will never teach or discuss Melville's texts in exactly the same ways again...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: Mary E. Wilkins Freeman's tales for and about children arose out of cultural constrictions formulated by a strict adherance and obediance to the Puritan values embedded in New England history. At the time she wrote these stories, New England was experiencing a population decline fuelled by massive changes in industry and farming, and the effects of war...read more

Product Description: This important new book argues that Henry James' fiction reveals a sophisticated theory of moral understanding and moral motivation. The claim is that James is engaged in a distinctive kind of original thinking and reflecting on modern moral life in his novels and short stories...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: He was the star and spokesman for the decade he called the "Jazz Age," the 1920's, the "greatest and gaudiest spree in history" which saw a whole race going hedonistic, deciding on pleasure. It all crashed and with it came a severe poisoning of "The American Dream...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: This study details the compatibility of ideas between Jonathan Edwards and Emanuel Swedenborg that helped forge the theological socialism of Henry James Sr. Duban demonstrates how a forgotten newspaper exchange between the elder James and Unitarian minister Henry Whitney Bellows clarified the Puritan foundations of the elder James's philosophy...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: In this book, Glenn Hendler explores what he calls the "logic of sympathy" in novels by Walt Whitman, Louisa May Alcott, T. S. Arthur, Martin Delany, Horatio Alger, Fanny Fern, Nathaniel Parker Willis, Henry James, Mark Twain, and William Dean Howells...read more

Product Description: Now at seventy-three volumes, this popular MLA series (ISSN 10591133) addresses a broad range of literary texts. Each volume surveys teaching aids and critical material and brings together essays that apply a variety of perspectives to teaching the text...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

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