Author: Harriet Beecher Stowe
Translator: Jong-in Lee
Publisher: Munhakdongne
2-vol. set | 210*140mm
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>>>This book is written in Korean. |
About This Book
This is one of those books that everybody has heard about but few people
these days have actually read. It deserves to be read - not simply
because it is the basis for symbols so deeply ingrained in American
culture that we no longer realize their source, nor because it is one of
the bestselling books of all time. This is a book that changed history.
Harriet Beecher Stowe was appalled by slavery, and she took one of the
few options open to nineteenth century women who wanted to affect public
opinion: she wrote a novel, a huge, enthralling narrative that claimed
the heart, soul, and politics of pre-Civil War Americans. It is
unabashed propaganda and overtly moralistic, an attempt to make whites -
North and South - see slaves as mothers, fathers, and people with
(Christian) souls. In a time when women might see the majority of their
children die, Harriet Beecher Stowe portrays beautiful Eliza fleeing
slavery to protect her son. In a time when many whites claimed slavery
had "good effects" on blacks, Uncle Tom's Cabin paints pictures of three
plantations, each worse than the other, where even the best plantation
leaves a slave at the mercy of fate or debt. By twentieth-century
standards, her propaganda verges on melodrama, and it is clear that even
while arguing for the abolition of slavery she did not rise above her
own racism. Yet her questions remain penetrating even today: "Is man
ever a creature to be trusted with wholly irresponsible power?"
When Uncle Tom's Cabin was published in 1852, it became an international
blockbuster, selling more than 300,000 copies in the United States alone
in its first year. Progressive for her time, Harriet Beecher Stowe was
one of the earliest writers to offer a shockingly realistic depiction of
slavery. Her stirring indictment and portrait of human dignity in the
most inhumane circumstances enlightened hundreds of thousands by
revealing the human costs of slavery, which had until then been cloaked
and justified by the racist misperceptions of the time. Langston Hughes
called it "a moral battle cry," noting that "the love and warmth and
humanity that went into its writing keep it alive a century later," and
Tolstoy described it as "flowing from love of God and man."
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