SOURCE: "The Power and Failure of Representation in Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, " in New Literary History, Vol. 23, No. 2, Spring, 1992, pp. 319-38.

In the following excerpt, Fluck examines Uncle Tom's Cabin in terms of various definitions of sentimentalism, discussing both its cultural importance and its aesthetic limitations.

Reacting against a long history of neglect, current revisionist studies of American literature have drawn our attention to Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin as an especially rich and powerful example of sentimentality in the novel. Such attempts to make sense of materials which critics drawing on formalist and modernist models of the literary text are no longer able to read redress a long-standing imbalance in American literary history. As is well known, American literary history has almost always been uneasy with Uncle Tom's Cabin, as it has been with sentimentality in general. On the one hand, no critic can...