SOURCE: Smith, Gail K. “Reading with the Other: Hermeneutics and the Politics of Difference in Stowe's Dred.” American Literature 69, no. 2 (June 1997): 289-307.

In the following essay, Smith discusses Stowe's treatment in Dred of a wide variety of possible interpretations of sacred and political texts based on gender, race, and class.

The late-twentieth-century recuperation of Harriet Beecher Stowe has made it routine, if not obligatory, to include Stowe in studies of the American Renaissance. Much of this recovery stems from the widespread influence of Jane Tompkins's critique of traditional critical and aesthetic priorities that have devalued work by women. Arguing that nineteenth-century women's writing isn't bad, just different, Tompkins has urged readers to “set aside” their expectations of “stylistic intricacy” and “epistemological complexity” when reading Stowe and other women writers.¹ Yet critics' tendency to defend their interest in women's writing, and especially the sentimental novel, in this way has...