康生 美国文学.ppt

Background Information There has never been any question about the power of Harriet Beecher Stowes Uncle Toms Cabin (1852) as a literary document and cultural phenomenon. In the first week of publication, 10,000 copies of the book were sold; 300,000 were sold by the end of 1852, making it the most successful bestseller of the nineteenth century. Soon after its publication, theatrical versions of the book were produced across the country, thus popularizing Stowes story and characters, several of whose names—Uncle Tom, Simon Legree, Topsy—became common expressions in the language. Furthermore, particular episodes in the novel—Eliza crossing the Ohio River on ice floes while clutching her baby, Little Eva dying, Uncle Tom enduring a beating that proves fatal—became iconic. President Lincoln allegedly told Stowe when he met her in 1862, So youre the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war! And when the contemporary critic John W. DeForest in 1868 coined the phrase the great American novel, he named Uncle Toms Cabin as the strongest candidate to date. While there has never been any doubt of its influence on American culture and history, Uncle Toms Cabin, like other so-called womens novels of the nineteenth century, failed to make it into the canon of American literature, as selected by professors and critics who downplayed its literary merit. Stowes depiction of slavery, her conviction about the centrality of the family, and her employment of the rhetoric of sentimentality were all factors in the novels resounding commercial success and political impact in the mid-1850s, but less than a century later, in 1948, the book was out of print. Only in the last thirty years, after the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s and the Womens Movement of the 1960s and 1970s, has Stowes book been reevaluated. Daughter of a nationally famous preacher, Lyman Beecher, sister to six brothers—all preachers—and married to a preacher, Stowe became a writer so th