Uncle Tom s Cabin

Самая знаменитая книга, описывающая рабство, была настолько злободневной на момент своего выхода, что спровоцировала социальные волнения, через десять лет вылившиеся в Гражданскую войну. "Хижина дяди Тома" наделала шуму на Севере Америки, была запрещена к изданию на Юге, а в итоге стала абсолютным бестселлером XIX века. Но и сегодня эта мелодраматичная история покоряет сердца читателей во всём мире. Читайте зарубежную литературу в оригинале! .

The second best-selling book of the 19th century, behind only the Bible, “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” is Harriet Beecher Stowe’s classic anti-slavery novel. First published in 1852, the work is a seminal piece of abolitionist literature which helped spur the country towards Civil War. The story centers on the lives of several slaves of a Kentucky farmer named Arthur Shelby. Mounting debts forces the farmer to sell two of his slaves, Uncle Tom, a middle-aged man with a wife and children, and Harry, the son of Eliza, the family’s maid. Fearing separation from her child, Eliza runs away with her son and reunites with her husband George, also an escaped slave, planning to travel north to Canada. Meanwhile Tom is sold and placed on a Mississippi river boat where he befriends a young white girl named Eva, whose father Augustine St. Clare purchases him and takes him to their home in New Orleans. What follows for Tom is a tragic set of circumstances which highlighted the brutal reality of slavery in early 19th century America. .

Гарриет Бичер-Стоу (1811-1896) - известная американская писательница. Роман "Хижина дяди Тома" (1851) завоевал широкую популярность, уже в первые десять лет после первого издания он был переведен на 22 языка и занял второе место (после Библии) в списке самых продаваемых книг в мире. В романе рассказывается о нелегкой судьбе чернокожих в Америке середины XIX века. Реалистичное описание ужасов рабства обличает его бесчеловечность и доказывает необходимость его отмены. Неадаптированный текст на языке оригинала снабжен комментариями и словарем. .

Uncle Tom's Cabin is the most popular, influential and controversial book written by an American. Stowe's rich, panoramic novel passionately dramatises why the whole of America is implicated in and responsible for the sin of slavery, and resoundingly concludes that only ‘repentance, justice and mercy’ will prevent the onset of ‘the wrath of Almighty God!’. The novel gave such a terrific impetus to the crusade for the abolition of slavery that President Lincoln half-jokingly greeted Stowe as‘the little lady’ who started the great Civil War. As Keith Carabine argues in his lively and provocative Introduction, the novel immediately provoked a storm of competing and contradictory responses among Northern and Southern readers, moderate and radical abolitionist groups, blacks and women, with regard to issues of form, genre, politics, religion, race and gender, that are still of great interest because they anticipate the concerns that vex and divide modern readers and critical constituencies. .