Epilogue: Critical Futures—Stowe and Douglass, Together and Separately

Summary

As the preceding chapters make apparent, much of the most important work on antislavery literature likely looms in the future. This chapter reflects on emerging directions for Stowe and Douglass studies, and for the study of abolitionist literature more broadly. The last quarter century has been characterized by an explosion in critical considerations of the two authors, separately and together, and they have come to occupy an increasing visible position in American society.

On Stowe’s side of the ledger, Uncle Tom’s Cabin is by now firmly established as one of a short list of novels that many scholars of nineteenth-century American literature write about, whether or not they see themselves as specialists on either the novel or its author. Studies of race, slavery, sectionalism, regionalism, gender, sexuality, religion, ethics, sentimentalism, and romanticism in nineteenth-century American literature are all likely to touch on Stowe’s best-seller, as are studies of popular culture and canonicity and reception history.

Given this growing ubiquity of Uncle Tom’s Cabin in nineteenth-century Americanist studies with a wide range of foci, saying something new about the novel is now entering territory reserved in the past for Moby-Dick, The Scarlet Letter, and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: something new certainly can be said, and indeed is said with some regularity, but the novel no longer presents scholars with a wide open field in almost any of its aspects. Stowe’s other novels, short stories, nonfiction, and poetry present a rather different prospect, as do the abolitionist novels that increased attention to Uncle Tom’s Cabin has brought back to critical awareness. The fact that Dred has increasingly come to be seen as a crucial intertext for Uncle Tom’s Cabin has meant that incautious generalization about Stowe’s racism based solely on her first novel have become far less common and that Stowe has become a more complex, rounded figure for literary critics and scholars than the bumbling religious fanatic that was sometimes dismissed in passing in earlier generations.

Stowe’s New England novels have enjoyed persistent but modest critical attention that has increased over the past few years. Her New York society novels have been less widely discussed but have been finding increased scholarly attention in the past decade.