The Underground Railroad and the politics of narration in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) by Delphine Louis-Dimitrov

“…It highlights the structuring function of philosophical and political principles drawn from romantic reform and transcendentalism, showing how they articulate with distinct literary strategies to convey an antislavery discourse targeting the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law. While the plotline is governed by a chain of sympathy relying on a reinterpretation of the antislavery principle of moral suasion, notably embraced by William Lloyd Garrison in the 1830s, the characterization of the enslaved fugitives as heroic rebels emphasizes the necessity of active and martial resistance to bondage, a strategy which gained prominence among abolitionists in the 1850s. …”
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