Uncle Tom's Cabin (Signet classics) - Softcover

Stowe, Professor Harriet Beecher

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0451523024 ISBN 13: 9780451523020

Publisher: Penguin, 1991

Synopsis

`So you're the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war!'

These words, said to have been uttered by Abraham Lincoln, signal the celebrity of Uncle Tom's Cabin. The first American novel to become an international best-seller, Stowe's novel charts the progress from slavery to freedom of fugitives who escape the chains of American chattel slavery, and of a martyr who transcends all earthly ties. At the middle of the nineteenth-century, the names of its characters - Little Eva, Topsy, Uncle Tom - were renowned. A hundred years later, `Uncle Tom' still had meaning, but, to Blacks everywhere it had become a curse.

This edition firmly locates Uncle Tom's Cabin within the context of African-American writing, the issues of race and the role of women. Its appendices include the most important contemporary African-American literary responses to the glorification of Uncle Tom's Christian resignation as well as excerpts from popular slave narratives, quoted by Stowe in her justification of the dramatization of slavery, Key to Uncles Tom's Cabin.

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About this title

Review:

"Uncle Tom's Cabin is the most powerful and enduring work of art ever written about American slavery."--Alfred Kazin

From the Back Cover:

With its extraordinary capacity to move its readers, 'Uncle Tom's Cabin' evoked a surge of indignation that contributed crucially to the abolition of slavery in America.

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin
• Publication date: 1991
• ISBN 10: 0451523024
• ISBN 13: 9780451523020
• Binding: Mass Market Paperback
• Number of pages: 496