A pathbreaking consideration of the intertwined critical responses to
Harriet Beecher Stowe and Frederick Douglass, giants of abolitionist
literature.
Harriet Beecher Stowe and Frederick Douglass represent a crucial strand
in nineteenth-century American literature: the struggle for the
abolition of slavery. Yet there has been no thoroughgoing discussion of
the critical receptionof these two giants of abolitionist literature.
Reading Abolition narrates and explores the parallels between Stowe's
critical reception and Douglass's. The book begins with Stowe's Uncle
Tom's Cabin, considering its initial celebration as a work of genius and
conscience, its subsequent dismissal in the early twentieth century as
anti-Southern and in the mid-twentieth century as racially
stereotypical, and finally its recent recovery as a classic of women's,
religious, and political fiction. It also considers the reception of
Stowe's other, less well-known novels, non-fictional works, and poetry,
and how engaging the full Stowe canon has changed the shape of Stowe
studies. The second half of the study deals with the reception of
Douglass both as a writer of three autobiographies that helped to define
the contours of African American autobiography for later writers and
critics and as an extraordinarily eloquent and influential orator and
journalist. Reading Abolition shows that Stowe's and Douglass's critical
destinies have long been intertwined, with questions about race, gender,
nationalism, religion, and thenature of literary and rhetorical genius
playing crucial roles in critical considerations of both figures.
Brian Yothers is Frances Spatz Leighton Endowed Distinguished Professor
and Associate Chair of the Department ofEnglish at the University of
Texas at El Paso.
