from Harriet Beecher Stowe, staunch abolitionist and unwavering champion of the oppressed African American, the other from one of her most relentless opponents. But which is which? In this case the system is not slavery but the Highland Clearances, and it is the second quotation which comes from Stowe, whereas the first is taken from Donald MacLeod’s furious riposte to her. MacLeod’s account of the forced eviction of the tenants of the Duchess of Sutherland, their homes burnt over their heads, their surviving families removed to the barren coastal lands, the
significant to see that for George Eliot she was a figure who needed no introduction. For Henry James, a generation later, although her death in a shipwreck in 1850 and the shock and distress that caused his parents was one of his earliest memories, she remained a poignant and virtually legendary figure.6 In October 1856, George Eliot reviewed a very different group of texts: novels which included Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Dred. She expressed her admiration for the American author and refused to deprecate her production of ‘a second Negro novel’ because: her genius seems to be
This book addresses the special relationship from the perspective of post-Second World War British governments. It argues that Britain's foreign policy challenges the dominant idea that its power has been waning and that it sees itself as the junior partner to the hegemonic US. The book also shows how at moments of international crisis successive British governments have attempted to re-play the same foreign policy role within the special relationship. It discusses the power of a profoundly antagonistic relationship between Mark Twain and Walter Scott. The book demonstrates Stowe's mis-reading and mis-representation of the Highland Clearances. It explains how Our Nig, the work of a Northern free black, also provides a working-class portrait of New England farm life, removed from the frontier that dominates accounts of American agrarian life. Telegraphy - which transformed transatlantic relations in the middle of the century- was used by spiritualists as a metaphor for the ways in which communications from the other world could be understood. The story of the Bolton Whitman Fellowship is discussed. Beside Sarah Orne Jewett's desk was a small copy of the well-known Raeburn portrait of Sir Walter Scott. Henry James and George Eliot shared a transatlantic literary network which embodied an easy flow of mutual interest and appreciation between their two milieux. In her autobiography, Gertrude Stein assigns to her lifelong companion the repeated comment that she has met three geniuses in her life: Stein, Picasso, and Alfred North Whitehead.
. The nature of the relationships examined in these essays range between the metaphorical and the actual, but they also reveal the intricate nexus of correspondences or connections which existed outside the main pairings investigated by contributors and which will bear further investigation. Take the case of George Eliot, Harriet Beecher Stowe and Charlotte Brontë, who were brought together through communications both earthly and other-worldly. Stowe wrote to Eliot describing a long ‘conversation’ she had held (via the planchette) with the spirit of Charlotte Brontë
by noting that when Harriet Beecher Stowe visited Britain, in 1853, abolition and spiritualism were ‘among the foremost topics of the day’.15 One observer wrote to her husband that ‘The great talk now is Mrs Stowe and spirit-rapping, both of which have arrived in England’.16 The notion of arrival is more fraught and problematic than this contemporary Spiritualism and the Atlantic divide 97 commentator suggests, but for the moment I will use it without challenging it.17 The implied substitution (by Owen) of ‘American’ for ‘transatlantic’ is also problematic, as
circulated amid prevailing sentimentalism and popular Christian martyrology, which helped the British to envisage their nation as a moral community founded in persecution, death and religious virtue’.27 As enslaved persons became Christian in the early nineteenth century, this language of martyrdom became ever more prevalent. The most famous Christianinflected account of the travails that enslaved people put up with from evil and violent masters was Harriet Beecher Stowe’s bestselling Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852). In this novel, Stowe draws on stories of slave resistance from
4 Our Nig: fetters of an American farmgirl R.J. Ellis From her who ever was and still’s a slave (Mary Collier, 1739)1 Following its rediscovery by Henry Louis Gates Jr in 1982, Harriet Wilson’s Our Nig (1859) was quickly identified as a double first – the first African-American novel published by a woman and the first AfricanAmerican novel published in the USA. It was also rapidly located within its ante-bellum abolitionist literary contexts. Plainly Our Nig draws upon Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) and slave narrative writing of this period.2 My
his diary, the quote goes unglossed by commentary. It just stands there, perhaps alongside another unglossed quote, as for instance the entry for 17 172 Enthusiast! Essays on Modern American Literature August 1970, which consists simply of a quote from Harriet Beecher Stowe, and then this from the Memoir of the English engraver Thomas Bewick: From my sheep thus drawing into shelter, gave rise to an opinion I formed, and which has been confirmed by long reflection, that much may yet be done to protect the larger flocks from being overblown and lost on the bleak
By expanding the geographical scope of the history of violence and war, this volume challenges both Western and state-centric narratives of the decline of violence and its relationship to modernity. It highlights instead similarities across early modernity in terms of representations, legitimations, applications of, and motivations for violence. It seeks to integrate methodologies of the study of violence into the history of war, thereby extending the historical significance of both fields of research. Thirteen case studies outline the myriad ways in which large-scale violence was understood and used by states and non-state actors throughout the early modern period across Africa, Asia, the Americas, the Atlantic, and Europe, demonstrating that it was far more complex than would be suggested by simple narratives of conquest and resistance. Moreover, key features of imperial violence apply equally to large-scale violence within societies. As the authors argue, violence was a continuum, ranging from small-scale, local actions to full-blown war. The latter was privileged legally and increasingly associated with states during early modernity, but its legitimacy was frequently contested and many of its violent forms, such as raiding and destruction of buildings and crops, could be found in activities not officially classed as war.