Over Uncle Tom's Dead Body: Publication Context and Textual Variation in Harriet Beecher Stowe's <title rend="italic">Uncle Tom's Cabin Wesley Raabe Wesley Raabe Kent State University wraabe@kent.edu

Wesley Raabe is an Assistant Professor of Textual Editing and American Literature at Kent State University. He is at work on a project entitled <title rend="italic">Uncle Tom’s Cabin: A Digital Critical Edition. The digital project will provide authoritative transcriptions, archival image facsimiles, and a textual apparatus for the surviving manuscript pages and for selected publication forms of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin: the National Era serial version, publisher John P. Jewett’s three initial print versions, and the 1879 Houghton Osgood New Edition.

 000062 003 3 article 29 September 2009

Authored for DHQ; migrated from original DHQauthor format

 DHQ classification scheme; full list available in the DHQ keyword taxonomy Keywords supplied by author; no controlled vocabulary Initial encoding

Serial Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Simon Legree, and the Fiction of Honor: A Dead Man at Auction

Poster Abstract

On 18 March 1852, publisher John P. Jewett's two-volume edition of Uncle Tom's Cabin was made available for sale. On the same day, an installment of the Stowe's ongoing serial appeared in the National Era. In the newspaper, opposite the page on which Stowe's devilish slaveholder Simon Legree says I don't sell dead niggers, a brief reprint indicates that a Greenville, South Carolina slave auction had included for sale one fellow deceased. This poster invites you to explore the newspaper article as a commentary on the interaction between Stowe's fiction and what the Era reports as the Southern reality. And it invites you to contemplate Stowe's two alternate explanations for young George Shelby's punch, which levels Simon Legree. The poster promotes Harriet Beecher Stowe's <title rend="italic">Uncle Tom's Cabin: an Electronic Edition of the National Era Version (1996), a digital dissertation project available through the University of Virginia's Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities at http://www.iath.virginia.edu/~wnr4c/index.htm.

Poster

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