A LITERARY CIVIL WAR
A LITERARY CIVIL WAR

Summary/Abstract: Fiction and fact seem to have interacted much more significantly in American culture than in any other one in world history; America's greatest war itself may have been arguably caused by the impact of one or several novel/s. Uncle Tom's Cabin was published in 1852, and in the following thirteen years (till the outbreak of the Civil War) something like thirty "anti-Tom novels" (an average of three per year) came out, and thus a literary war may have anticipated the real war (Abraham Lincoln's famous greeting is apocryphal). The paper gives a description of the socio-political-literary-cultural context, of Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel (alongside her Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin) and of the "anti-Tom literature", thus being more of a piece of cultural criticism than of literary history and interpretation; the focus is not on the substance of the novels themselves, but rather on their impact and function in the period.

• Details
• Contents