"Uncle Tom's Cabin"

Paper Summary:

This paper discusses the transformation of the novel "Uncle Tom?s Cabin", by Harriet Beecher Stowe into a cultural icon. It looks at how the creation and recreation of the text by its readers, adapters and its foremost opponents, helped to polarize the abolitionist debate. The paper suggests that the responses to and adaptations of the text of "Uncle Tom's Cabin" provided a means by which the novel assumed a principal role in American culture through various media--the theater, film, posters, paintings, follow-on writings, essays and press coverage. Finally, the paper suggests that the articulation and reconstruction of the text by its readers brought on a range of social and political meanings and results.

Background: The Origins of a Living Document
Introduction
North and South Polarized
Critics Respond
The Abolitionist Debates
The Tom Caricature
The Greatest Impact

From the Paper:

"In what way did this text change the traditional relationship between reader and the novel? The reader became the author, interpreter, director, actor, witness and part and parcel of the story. The story, instead of being about life, became life, and life in turn became its own version of the story. In this context of slavery, religion, melodrama, and family crisis, Uncle Tom's Cabin can be viewed as a cultural pattern instead of an isolated work. Almost as soon as it was published as a novel, Stowe's story was adapted for the American stage; from 1852 until well into the twentieth century, adaptations of Uncle Tom's Cabin were among the most popular productions that a theater company could stage. Stowe, however, never condoned nor participated in developing the productions, nor did she earn any money from these adaptations."

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• Analytical Essay # 133101 : "The Evils of Slavery in "Uncle Tom's Cabin"

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