求英语论文 选择一个英美文学作家及其作品做赏析要求不少于2500 水平不用很高 大一选修课的论文 提供链接或者复制原文都可以

求英语论文 选择一个英美文学作家及其作品做赏析要求不少于2500 水平不用很高 大一选修课的论文 提供链接或者复制原文都可以
求英语论文 选择一个英美文学作家及其作品做赏析
要求不少于2500 水平不用很高 大一选修课的论文
提供链接或者复制原文都可以

求英语论文 选择一个英美文学作家及其作品做赏析要求不少于2500 水平不用很高 大一选修课的论文 提供链接或者复制原文都可以
Sentimental Power: Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the Politics of Literary History
The specifically political intent of the novel is apparent in its forms of address. Stowe addresses her readers not simply as individuals but as citizens of the United States: “to you, generous, noble-minded men and women, of the South,”(XLV, 513) “farmers of Massachusetts, of New Hampshire, of Vermont,” “brave and generous men of New York,” “and you, mothers of America”(XLV, 514). She speaks to her audience directly in the way the Old Testament prophets spoke to Israel, exhorting, praising, blaming, warning of the wrath to come. “This is an age of the world when nations are trembling and convulsed. A mighty influence is abroad, surging and heaving the world, as with an earthquake. And is America safe?…O, Church of Christ, read the signs of the times!”(XLV, 519). Passages like these, descended from the revivalist rhetoric of “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” are intended, in the words of a noted scholar, “to direct an imperiled people toward the fulfillment of their destiny, to guide them individually toward salvation, and collectively toward the American city of God.”
These words are from Sacvan Bercovitch’s The American Jeremiad, an influential work of modern scholarship which, although it completely ignores Stowe’s novel, makes us aware that Uncle Tom’s Cabin is a jeremiad in the fullest and truest sense. A jeremiad, in Bercovitch’s definition, is “a mode of public exhortation…designed to join social criticism to spiritual renewal, public to private identity, the shifting ‘signs of the times’ to certain traditional metaphors, themes, and symbols.” Stowe’s novel provides the most obvious and compelling instance of the jeremiad since the Great Awakening, and its exclusion from Bercovitch’s book is a striking instance of how totally academic criticism has foreclosed on sentimental fiction; for, because Uncle Tom’s Cabin is absent from the canon, it isn’t “there” to be referred to even when it fulfils a man’s theory to perfection. Hence its exclusion from critical discourse is perpetuated automatically, and absence begets itself in a self-confirming cycle of neglect. Nonetheless, Bercovitch’s characterization of the jeremiad provides an excellent account of how Uncle Tom’s Cabin actually worked: among its characters, settings, situations, symbols, and doctrines, the novel establishes a set of correspondences which unite the disparate realms of experience Bercovitch names--social and spiritual, public and private, theological and political--and, through the vigor of its representations, attempts to move the nation as a whole toward the vision it proclaims.
The tradition of the jeremiad throws light on Uncle Tom’s Cabin because Stowe’s novel was political in exactly the same-way the jeremiad was: both were forms of discourse in which “theology was wedded to politics and politics to the progress of the kingdom of God.” The jeremiad strives to persuade its listeners to a providential view of human history which serves, among other things, to maintain the Puritan theocracy in power. Its fusion of theology and politics is not only doctrinal--in that it ties the salvation of the individual to the community’s historical enterprise--it is practical as well, for it reflects the interests of Puritan ministers in their bid to retain spiritual and secular authority. The sentimental novel, too, is an act of persuasion aimed at defining social reality; the difference is that the jeremiad represents the interests of Puritan ministers, while the sentimental novel represents the interests of middle-class women. But the relationship between rhetoric and history in both cases is the same. In both cases it is not as if rhetoric and history stand opposed, with rhetoric made up of wish fulfillment and history made up of recalcitrant facts that resist rhetoric’s onslaught. Rhetoric makes history by shaping reality to the dictates of its political design; it makes history by convincing the people of the world that its description of the world is the true one. The sentimental novelists make their bid for power by positing the kingdom of heaven on earth as a world over which women exercise ultimate control. If history did not take the course these writers recommended, it is not because they were not political, but because they were insufficiently persuasive.
Uncle Tom’s Cabin, however, unlike its counterparts in the sentimental tradition, was spectacularly persuasive in conventional political terms: it helped convince a nation to go to war and to free its slaves. But in terms of its own conception of power, a conception it shares with other sentimental fiction, the novel was a political failure. Stowe conceived her book as an instrument for bringing about the day when the world would be ruled not by force, but by Christian love. The novel’s deepest political aspirations are expressed only secondarily in its devastating attack on the slave system; the true goal of Stowe’s rhetorical undertaking is nothing less than the institution of the kingdom of heaven on earth. Embedded in the world of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which is the fallen world of slavery, there appears an idyllic picture, both utopian and Arcadian, of the form human life would assume if Stowe’s readers were to heed her moral lesson. In this vision, described in the chapter entitled “The Quaker Settlement,” Christian love fulfills itself not in war, but in daily living, and the principle of sacrifice is revealed not in crucifixion, but in motherhood. The form that Stowe’s utopian society takes bears no resemblance to the current social order. Man-made institutions--the church, the courts of law, the legislatures, the economic system--are nowhere in sight. The home is the center of all meaningful activity; women perform the most important tasks; work is carried on in a spirit of mutual cooperation; and the whole is guided by a Christian woman who, through the influence of her “loving words,” “gentle moralities,” and “motherly loving kindness,” rules the world from her rocking chair.
For why? for twenty years or more, nothing but loving words, and gentle moralities, and motherly loving kindness, had come from that chair;--head-aches and heart-aches innumerable had been cured there,--difficulties spiritual and temporal solved there,--all by one good, loving woman, God bless her! (XIII, 163)
The woman in question is God in human form. Seated in her kitchen at the head of her table, passing out coffee and cake for breakfast, Rachel Halliday, the millenarian counterpart of little Eva, enacts the redeemed form of the last supper. This is holy communion as it will be under the new dispensation: instead of the breaking of bones, the breaking of bread. The preparation of breakfast exemplifies the way people will work in the ideal society; there will be no competition, no exploitation, no commands. Motivated by self-sacrificing love, and joined to one another by its cohesive power, people will perform their duties willingly and with pleasure: moral suasion will take the place of force.
All moved obediently to Rachel’s gentle “Thee had better,” or more gentle “Hadn’t thee better?” in the work of getting breakfast…Everything went on so sociably, so quietly, so harmoniously, in the great kitchen,--it seemed so pleasant to every one to do just what they were doing, there was such an atmosphere of mutual confidence and good fellowship everywhere….(XIII, 169-170)
The new matriarchy which Isabella Beecher Hooker had dreamed of leading, pictured here in the Indiana kitchen (“for a breakfast in the luxurious valleys of Indiana is…like picking up the rose-leaves and trimming the bushes in Paradise,” [XIII, 169]), constitutes the most politically subversive dimension of Stowe’s novel, more disruptive and far-reaching in its potential consequences than even the starting of a war or the freeing of slaves. Nor is the ideal of matriarchy simply a daydream; Catherine Beecher, Stowe’s elder sister, had offered a ground plan for the realization of such a vision in her Treatise on Domestic Economy (184), which the two sisters republished in an enlarged version entitled The American Woman’s Home in 1869. Dedicated “To the Women of America, in whose hands rest the real destinies of the republic,” this is an instructional book on homemaking in which a wealth of scientific information and practical advice are pointed toward a millenarian goal. Centering on the home, for these women, is not a way of indulging in narcissistic fantasy, as critics have argued, or a turning away from the world into self-absorption and idle reverie; it is the prerequisite of world conquest--defined as the reformation of the human race through proper care and nurturing of its young. Like Uncle Tom’s Cabin, The American Woman’s Home situates the minutiae of domestic life in relation to their soteriological function: “What then, is the end designed by the family state which Jesus Christ came into this world to secure? It is to provide for the training of our race…by means of the self-sacrificing labors of the wise and good…with chief reference to a future immortal existence.” “The family state,” the authors announce at the beginning, “is the aptest earthly illustration of the heavenly kingdom, and…woman is its chief minister.” In the body of the text, the authors provide women with everything they need to know for the proper establishment and maintenance of home and family, from the construction of furniture (“The [bed] frame is to be fourteen inches from the floor…and three inches in thickness. At the head, and at the foot, is to be screwed a notched two-inch board, three inches wide, as in Fig.8,” [30]), to architectural plans, to chapters of instruction on heating, ventilation, lighting, healthful diet, preparation of food, cleanliness, the making and mending of clothes, the care of the sick, the organization of routines, financial management, psychological health, the care of infants, the managing of young children, home amusement, the care of furniture, planting of gardens, the care of domestic animals, the disposal of waste, the cultivation of fruit, and providing for the “Homeless, the Helpless, and the Vicious” (433). After each of these activities has been treated in detail, they conclude by describing the ultimate aim of the domestic enterprise. The founding of a “truly ‘Christian family’” will lead to the gathering of a “Christian neighborhood.” This “cheering example,” they continue,
would soon spread, and ere long colonies from these prosperous and Christian communities would go forth to shine as “lights of the world” in all the now darkened nations. Thus the “Christian family” and “Christian neighborhood” would become the grand ministry, as they were designed to be, in training our whole race for heaven.
The imperialistic drive behind the encyclopedism and determined practicality of this household manual flatly contradicts the traditional derogations of the American cult of domesticity as a “mirror-phenomenon,” “self-immersed” and “self-congratulatory.” The American Woman’s Home is a blueprint for colonizing the world in the name of the “family state”(19) under the leadership of Christian women. What is more, people like Stowe and Catherine Beecher were speaking not simply for a set of moral and religious values. In speaking for the home, they speak for an economy--a household economy--which had supported New England life since its inception. The home, rather than representing a retreat or a refuge from a crass industrial-commercial world, offers an economic alternative to that world, one which calls into question the whole structure of American society which was growing up in response to the increase in trade and manufacturing. Stowe’s image of a utopian community as presented in Rachel Halliday’s kitchen is not simply a Christian dream of communitarian cooperation and harmony; it is a reflection of the real communitarian practices of village life, practices which depended upon cooperation, trust, and a spirit of mutual supportiveness which characterize the Quaker community of Stowe’s novel.
One could argue, then, that for all its revolutionary fervor, Uncle Tom’s Cabin is a conservative book, because it advocates a return to an older way of life--household economy--in the name of the nation’s most cherished social and religious beliefs. Even the emphasis on the woman’s centrality might be seen as harking back to the ‘age of homespun” when the essential goods were manufactured in the home and their production was carried out and guided by women. But Stowe’s very conservatism--her reliance on established patterns of living and traditional beliefs--is precisely what gives her novel its revolutionary potential. By pushing those beliefs to an extreme and by insisting that they be applied universally, not just to one segregated corner of civil life, but to the conduct of all human affairs, Stowe means to effect a radical transformation of her society. The brilliance of the strategy is that it puts the central affirmations of a culture into the service of a vision that would destroy the present economic and social institutions; by resting her case, absolutely, on the saving power of Christian love and on the sanctity of motherhood and the family, Stowe relocates the center of power in American life, placing it not in the government, nor in the courts of law, nor in the factories, nor in the marketplace, but in the kitchen. And that means that the new society will not be controlled by men, but by women. The image of the home created by Stowe and Beecher in their treatise on domestic science is in no sense a shelter from the stormy-blast of economic and political life, a haven from reality divorced from fact which allows the machinery of industrial capitalism to grind on; it is conceived as a dynamic center of activity, physical and spiritual, economic and moral, whose influence spreads out in ever-widening circles. To this activity--and this is the crucial innovation--men are incidental. Although the Beecher sisters pay lip service on occasion to male supremacy, women’s roles occupy virtually the whole of their attention and dominate the scene. Male provender is deemphasized in favor of female processing. Men provide the seed, but women bear and raise the children. Men provide the flour, but women bake the bread and get the breakfast. The removal of the male from the center to the periphery of the human sphere is the most radical component of this millenarian scheme, which is rooted so solidly in the most traditional values--religion, motherhood, home, and family. Exactly what position men will occupy in the millennium is specified by a detail inserted casually into Stowe’s description of the Indiana kitchen. While the women and children are busy preparing breakfast, Simeon Halliday, the husband and father, stands “in his shirtsleeves before a little looking-glass in the corner, engaged in the anti-patriarchal operation of shaving” (XIII, 169).
With this detail, so innocently placed, Stowe reconceives the role of men in human history: while Negroes, children, mothers, and grandmothers do the world’s primary work, men groom themselves contentedly in a corner. The scene, as critics have noted is often the case in sentimental fiction, is “intimate,” the backdrop is “domestic,” the tone at times is even “chatty,” but the import, as critics have failed to recognize, is world-shaking. The enterprise of sentimental fiction, as Stowe’s novel attests, is anything but domestic, in the sense of being limited to purely personal concerns. Its mission, on the contrary, is global and its interests identical with the interests of the race. If the fiction written in the nineteenth century by women whose works sold in the hundreds of thousands has seemed narrow and parochial to the critics of the twentieth century, that narrowness and parochialism belong not to these works nor to the women who wrote them; they are the beholders’ share.

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