Artistic Liberty and Slave Imagery: "Mark Twain's Illustrator," E. W. Kemble, Turns to Harriet Beecher Stowe

A comparison of Edward Windsor Kemble's illustrations for the first edition of Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884––85) and for an 1891 edition of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) shows that Kemble could render enslaved African Americans or impoverished European Americans as delineated individuals or as stereotypical figures, as he catered to audiences that had a stake in seeing these characters as unique personalities or as racialized "types." Marketing Twain's and Stowe's novels for mass audiences, Kemble mediated between literary authors who invest marginalized characters with distinct personalities and empowered, mainstream audiences who were less willing to accept individuality in minority figures. Kemble was not the egregiously racist exception for his time, but a reliable rule for the mainstream American publishing establishment; he typified Gilded Age readers who enjoyed the privileges of purchasing, reading, and illustrating literary representations of marginalized subjects——subjects who clearly did not enjoy such social privileges themselves. When Kemble takes artistic liberties in illustrating literary representations of slavery, then, he demonstrates graphically how Gilded Age readers were taking their own liberties reinterpreting these stories of slaves.

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A FEMINIST READING OF UNCLE TOM’S CABIN

Cultural Communication And Socialization Journal ◽

10.26480/ccsj.02.2021.48.51 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 2 (2) ◽

pp. 48-51

Author(s):

Zhai Junli

Keyword(s):

African Americans ◽

Harriet Beecher Stowe ◽

Woman Writer ◽

Literary Canon ◽

Close Attention ◽

Uncle Tom's Cabin ◽

The World ◽

Enslaved African Americans ◽

Female Power

Published in 1852, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, or Life Among the Lowly, introduces the world to the tribulations of the enslaved African Americans. While as a woman writer, Harriet Beecher Stowe also pays close attention to female power and consciousness apart from the abolitionism in her work. Through the analysis of women’s domesticity and women’s strength in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, this paper attempts to fathom into Stowe’s feminist ideas manifested in this book, therefore colors the understanding of this literary canon.

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Were Tom and Huck On-Shelf? Public Libraries, Mark Twain, and the Formation of Accessible Canons, 1869––1910

Nineteenth-Century Literature ◽

10.1525/ncl.2009.64.2.189 ◽

2009 ◽

Vol 64 (2) ◽

pp. 189-224 ◽

Cited By ~ 2

Author(s):

Bernadette A. Lear

Keyword(s):

Gilded Age ◽

Public Libraries ◽

Mark Twain ◽

The United States ◽

Early Years ◽

Primary Sources ◽

Adventures Of Huckleberry Finn ◽

Late Nineteenth ◽

Huckleberry Finn

Public libraries are "accessible canons" for their communities. As part of their efforts to connect people and ideas, librarians purchase classic and bestselling books from "selective," "personal," "nonce," and other canons. They also create bibliographies, professional standards, and other tools that help shape reading habits. Thus libraries embody complex, ongoing processes of canon using and canon forming. This essay illustrates the canonical activities of American public libraries during the early years of the profession. It describes the American Library Association Catalog, local finding lists and accession records, and other primary sources that shed light on collection building during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Taking Mark Twain (Samuel Langhorne Clemens) as a case study, it presents statistics on library ownership during the author's lifetime from more than seven hundred communities across the United States. Tables focus on nine titles: The Innocents Abroad, Roughing It, The Gilded Age, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, The Prince and the Pauper, Life on the Mississippi, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, and The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson. Statistical analysis reveals that "controversial" items such as Huckleberry Finn were widely available in Gilded-Age and Progressive-era public libraries, thus calling into question some assumptions about censorship of Twain's work. Also, library holdings of some titles varied by decade and geography, demonstrating that libraries implemented "national" and "recognized" canons unevenly. In sum, the essay shifts attention toward the operationalization of literary canons and provides empirical evidence of Mark Twain's presence in the late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century literary landscape.

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Rhetorical engagement with racism: Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Literator ◽

10.4102/lit.v19i1.513 ◽

1998 ◽

Vol 19 (1) ◽

pp. 65-78

Author(s):

B. E. Kim

Keyword(s):

Communication Channel ◽

Mark Twain ◽

Dynamic Force ◽

Rhetorical Strategies ◽

Controversial Subject ◽

Adventures Of Huckleberry Finn ◽

Uncle Tom's Cabin ◽

Human Equality ◽

The Usa ◽

Huckleberry Finn

Racial relationships were an extremely controversial subject around the time of the Civil War in the USA. Harriet Beecher Stowe in Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Mark Twain in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn treat this provocative issue of race by entrusting important roles to the African-American characters. Uncle Tom and Jim. Predicting the reader's possible revolt against the blatant treatment of the issue, the two novelists use racist expressions in the convention of their contemporary audiences to construct a communication channel with their audiences. As a result, these novels have won enormous popularity. However, they have been criticized for racist tendencies Beneath the seemingly racist surface of their texts, Stowe and Twain present an innovative vision of unconditional human equality. Using various rhetorical strategies, these authors help their audiences realize the unfairness and false grounds of racism. The dialectic between the racist language and the anti-racist message of their texts creates a dynamic force spurring readers into a reconsideration of their attitude toward race.

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Coping with racism in Hebrew literary translation

Babel ◽

10.1075/babel.54.2.06wei ◽

2008 ◽

Vol 54 (2) ◽

pp. 171-186 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Rachel Weissbrod

Keyword(s):

Theoretical Approach ◽

Literary Translation ◽

Gone With The Wind ◽

Adventures Of Huckleberry Finn ◽

Uncle Tom's Cabin ◽

The People ◽

Huckleberry Finn

This article examines the treatment of racism in Hebrew literary translation. It relies on culture theorists such as Foucault, Said, Fanon and Bhabha who have analyzed the relations of a society with individuals and groups whom it regards as “others”. The texts discussed have been selected because they can illustrate critical arguments made by these theorists. They include texts which are openly racist (Henryk Sienkiewicz’s W pustyni i w puszczy [In Desert and Wilderness], Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind, Edgar Wallace’s The People of the River) and others that criticize racism but fall into the trap against which they warn (Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin). The article also refers to “Geschichte von den schwarzen Buben” (in English, “The Story of the Inky Boys”), one of the stories included in Heinrich Hoffmann’s Struwwelpeter (The Slovenly Peter). In the latter, the Hebrew translations (rather than the German source) make use of racist stereotypes. Inspired by translation researchers who regard translation as the meeting place of a culture with “others” (Venuti, Tymoczco, Cronin), the article also makes use of the concept of norms as elaborated by Toury. In line with his theoretical approach, it is assumed that the treatment of racism in translation depends not only on the overall attitude to racism in the receiving culture but also on its translation norms.

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The Slaves’ Foods: A Gastronomy Analysis in Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe

Journal Polingua : Scientific Journal of Linguistics, Literature and Education ◽

10.30630/polingua.v9i1.129 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 9 (1) ◽

pp. 24-33

Author(s):

Andy Amiruddin ◽

Khairil Anwar ◽

Ferdinal Ferdinal

Keyword(s):

South America ◽

Harriet Beecher Stowe ◽

Power Relation ◽

The Novel ◽

Uncle Tom's Cabin ◽

Soul Food

This paper discusses the foods eaten by the slaves from Uncle Tom’s Cabin about the nature of slavery that happens in South America. There are two contrast setting of places in the novel—Kentucky and Louisiana—that each has different food presentations for the slaves, and each presentation can reveal the power relation between masters and slaves. In gastronomy, when food is done right in writing, certain scenes from fiction can get the readers to experience it with all their senses and strange cravings. The finding in this writing is that the slaves creatively change the scraps and leftovers into finely soul foods of in the first set of the place, Kentucky. The second setting is a place in Louisiana, the slaves cannot have the soul food because the lack of food itself has chained them forever in the slavery. Each of this food presentations has directly revealed the nature of power relation between masters and slaves.

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