Uncle Tom's Cabin as Visual Culture Book

By personalizing the experiences of American slaves, Harriet Beecher Stowe s Uncle Tom s Cabin had a profound effect on public attitudes toward slavery on the eve of the Civil War, but Stowe s narrative was not the whole story. Jo-Ann Morgan now reveals how prints and paintings of Uncle Tom and other characters in the novel also shaped public perceptions and how this visual culture had its own impact on history. Through illustrations in various editions of the book, advertisements for stage productions, paintings of favorite scenes, and even sheet music for Tom-inspired songs, Stowe s work took on a visual as well as a textual existence. Morgan explores the visual discourse generated by Uncle Tom s Cabin within the context of evolving social conditions and political events of nineteenth-century America to show how images associated with the text came to have lives of their own.Read More