The Cambridge Introduction to Harriet Beecher Stowe Book

Preface     vii
Acknowledgments     ix
List of abbreviations     x
Life     1
Beecher lore and community vision     1
A Beecher education for social agency     3
Navigating Cincinnati as a cultural "contact zone"     4
Composing Uncle Tom's Cabin while housekeeping in Maine     6
Traveling as an international celebrity     8
Re-envisioning New England domesticity     9
The lure of the south     10
Final days in Hartford     11
Cultural contexts     13
Middle-class womanhood     13
Writing American literature     16
Racial politics     19
Religion     21
Class identity     23
Works     26
Early writings     26
Uncle Tom's Cabin     30
Stowe's Key, Dred, and The Christian Slave     61
Dramatizing Uncle Tom's Cabin     76
Travel writing     82
New England regionalist fiction     89
Additional late-career writings     94
Reception and critics     99
US readers' regional differences     100
Antebellum blacks as readers     105
African Americans' responses in a new century     111
Nineteenth-century European responses     113
Twentieth-century literary criticism     117
New directions in Stowe studies     121
Notes     124
Further reading     132
Index     138