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Uncle Tom Mania: Slavery, Minstrelsy and Transatlantic Culture in the 1850s. By Sarah Meer. (Athens, Ga., and London: University of Georgia Press, c. 2005. Pp. x, 332. Paper, $24.95, ISBN 0-8203-2737-9.)
Sarah Meer's Uncle Tom Mania: Slavery, Minstrelsy and Transatlantic Culture in the 1850s is a fascinating study of the myriad transatlantic cultural phenomena spurred by Harriet Beecher Stowe's 1852 novel Uncle Tom's Cabin. Meer's main focus is not so much on Stowe's novel itself but rather on the ways it was rewritten and reread by various elements of American and British culture. Meer's arrangement of her chapters follows the trajectory of Stowe's novel-its stage productions and the anti-Tom novels from the U.S. to Britain and back-and examines how blackface minstrelsy, abolitionism and its working-class critics, and British-American relations shaped the various mutations,...