Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin is amongst the most popular pieces of American literature and has been turned into comics, film and TV-series. At the time of its publication, it was celebrated by some as a master-piece of abolition literature and criticized by others as a misrepresentation of plantation life in the South. All seemed to agree though that it was symptomatic of the pervading discussion of the rights and wrongs of slavery at the time. This class is going to read Uncle Tom's Cabin (a must read for all students of American studies) within its generic and cultural context. For all its criticism of Southern slavery, Uncle Tom's Cabin forms part of an inherently Southern literary tradition, that of plantation fiction. In order to understand its impact and afterlife, the course is going to explore antebellum and postbellum plantation narratives, focusing on changing genre conventions. We are going to start with early nineteenth-century plantation novels, look at Uncle Tom's Cabin in more detail and shall then proceed to discuss postbellum tales, finishing with adaptations of two novels by Margaret Mitchell (Gone with the Wind, 1936/1939) and Thomas Dixon (The Clansman (1905)/The Birth of a Nation, 1915) respectively. All in all, we are going to delineate the changing characteristics of the genre that coincide with socio-political developments in the South. You are going to employ narratological analyses and discuss thematic foci.
Required Reading:
Primary Texts:
Kennedy, John Pendleton. Swallow Barn; or, A Sojourn in the Old Dominion (1832)
Simms, William Gilmore. The Lazy Crow: A Story of the Cornfield (1845)
Stowe, Harriet Beecher. Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or Life amongst the Lowly (1852)
Harris, Joel Chandler. “The Wonderful Tar-Baby Story,” and “How Mr. Rabbit Was Too Sharp for Mr. Fox”
Page, Thomas Nelson. “Marse Chan” (1897)
Chesnutt, Charles W. “The Goophered Grapevine” (1899)
Fleming, Victor. Gone with the Wind (1936)
Griffith, D. W. The Birth of a Nation (1915)
Selected texts in:
The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 9th edition
The Literature of the American South. A Norton Anthology, 1st edition
Secondary Literature (selection):
Gray, Richard and Owen Robinson, ed. A Companion to the Literature and Culture of the American South. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishing, 2005. Print.
Harrison, Elizabeth Jane. Female Pastoral. Women Writers Re-Visioning the American South. Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 1991. Print.
Monteith, Sharon. The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of the American South. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2013. Print.
Russ, Elizabeth Christine. The Plantation in the Postslavery Imagination. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2009.
Seidel, Kathryn Lee. The Southern Belle in the American Novel. Tampa: University of South Florida Press, 1985. Print.
Admission settings
The course is part of admission "Zeitgesteuerte Anmeldung: Plantation Fiction (BA)-Aufbaumodul: Amerikanistik Literatur I".
The following rules apply for the admission:
The enrolment is possible from 25.03.2019, 00:00 to 03.04.2019, 23:59.
