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Harrtet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin: A Casebook. Edited by Elizabeth Ammons. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. x + 248 pp. $125.00/$29.95 paper.
The Cambridge Introduction to Harriet Beecher Stowe. By Sarah Robbins. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007. x + 144 pp. $75.00/$21.99 paper/$16.00 e-book.
Harriet Beecher Stowe has been celebrated, denigrated, recovered, and canonized, in roughly that order, as her reputation has experienced the ebb and flow of critical reception from the nineteenth century to today. Following the now-familiar trajectory of recovery, Stowe was initially championed by feminist critics who sought to counter the aesthetic judgment, political condemnation, or outright disregard she had suffered in preceding decades. While these scholars were successful at garnering a place in the canon for Stowe and her most famous novel, Uncle Tom's Cabin, they have been criticized for softpedaling both the author's and the novel's shortcomings. Subsequent criticism has acknowledged Stowe's racism, her investment in domestic idealism, and her exploitation of black suffering while arguing that these characteristics reveal her to be grappling with race and gender in more complex ways than previously acknowledged. In fact, much of the recent criticism has sought to divest Stowe of a binary status in the defining debates of her era (either for or against racial equality, African colonization, women's rights, and so forth) and instead to locate her in a middle ground of ambiguity, negotiation, and contradiction that more accurately reflects her relationship to a society in a state of combustion.
Two recent publications demonstrate that contemporary Stowe criticism, now well into its fourth decade, has achieved a status and stability rivaling that of other well-known authors. Elizabeth Ammons's Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin: A Casebook and Sarah Robbins's The Cambridge Introduction to Harriet Beecher Stowe join a growing body of criticism that testifies to Stowe's establishment as a canonical figure, including Approaches to Teaching Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (2000), The Cambridge Companion to Harriet Beecher Stowe (2004), and Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin: A Sourcebook (2003), as well as previous but still influential works such as New Essays on Uncle...