Uncle Tom's Cabin (Wordsworth Classics) [Paperback]

"Shortly after its publication and within Stowe's lifetime, it transcended the category of literature to become that rarest of products: a cultural artifact; a Rosetta stone for black images in American fiction, theater, and film--not so much a novel, one might say, as an experience inseparable from the events that precipitated the Civil War. ('So this, ' Abraham Lincoln said, famously, when he met Stowe, 'is the little lady who wrote the book that made this great war.') It has been the Urtext or common coin for discussions about slavery for a century and a half, one woman's very influential interpretation of the Peculiar Institution--an interpretation that we may love or hate, admire or despise, defend or reject, in whole or in part. It is nonetheless a story that so permeates white popular and literary culture, and sits so high astride nineteenth-century American fiction, that it simply can never be ignored." --from the Introduction by Charles Johnson
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Uncle Tom's Cabin is the most popular, influential and controversial book written by an American. Stowe's rich, panoramic novel passionately dramatises why the whole of America is implicated in and responsible for the sin of slavery, and resoundingly concludes that only 'repentance, justice and mercy' will prevent the onset of 'the wrath of Almighty God!'.

'The man's mine and I do what I please with him – that's it!'

Published in 1852, 'Uncle Tom's Cabin' was an immediate success, was influential in securing the abolition of slavery and established Harriet Beecher Stowe as America's first major woman novelist. With a compelling narrative and memorable characters, the novel vividly explores the relationship between slave, trader and owner, and exposes a system in which men, women and even children were property to be bought and sold for profit or to settle debts. Still capable of arousing both compassion and anger, 'Uncle Tom's Cabin' was described by Tolstoy as “one of the greatest productions of the human mind.”

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Jean Fagan Yellin is Distinguished Professor in the Department of English at Pace University.