ABSTRACT
This chapter explores some of the ways that readers adapt Uncle Tom’s Cabin to new and sometimes surprising ends. It considers, in particular, how such analytical refocusing can foreground new understandings of the relationship between cultural value and social difference. Recent analyses of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s text frequently gesture toward its historical and affective elasticity: namely, how the book continues to open out from its nineteenth-century context, and how to reach back to it. The operating logic of Uncle Tom’s Cabin depends on the presence of such unconventionality, a textual disposition toward the world that captivates students newly encountering the novel. The historical reverberations of Stowe’s novel call attention to this dynamic by revealing “the crucial role that emotional attachments play in the development of the self, and they function as pedagogical tools, teaching their readers how to interact and establish community with others.” Such pedagogical lessons, of course, are not restricted to antebellum contexts.
