Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Uncle Tom’s Cabin'

Harriet Beecher Stowe penned Uncle Tom’s Cabin which was published in 1852. This book exposed and condemned the atrocities of slavery. Her book became a bestseller and is said to be one of the primary reasons why slavery was eventually abolished. Though slavery has been dismantled the system of oppression which allowed the marginalization of others to thrive has never been eliminated. This system established a dominant culture; one which oppresses those of African descent and has endured for centuries. Tommi’s Place retells Uncle Tom’s Cabin in contemporary corporate America. Tommi’s Place reflects that this system of oppression is still alive and well today. It exists in the form of discriminatory practices that thwart, prevent, preclude, and stop the advancement of the marginalized especially those of African descent.

This thesis is a revisionist study of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a renowned American classic by Mrs. Stowe, and its Chinese translations. Thematically refreshing the novel as imperialist, I intend to therefore shed new lights in appreciating its century-long journey across China by studying two definitive rewritings of the original, heinu yutian lu （《黑奴吁天?》）from late Qing and heinu hen（《黑奴恨》）from the 1960s. The thesis structurally contains four parts. Chapter 1 introduces the project generally. Chapter 2 studies the original text and chapter 3 and 4 the two Chinese translated texts respectively. Re-reading of the original is crucial. Inspired by Edward Said’s efforts in connecting western culture and Imperialism, I established civilizing mission as core of the black narrative in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a novel widely celebrated as masterpiece of abolitionist literature. My argument is based on textual analysis. I will argue that evangelization of Africa, rather than abolition of slavery, had been Stowe’s fundamental concern in building Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and it is exactly driven by this civilizing mission that she dictated the roles of the novel’s two leading black characters, Uncle Tom and George Harris. Tom, the Christian martyr, is to prove Africans’ capability of getting civilized; Harris, Stowe’s Christian patriot, is the pioneer of colonizing Africa into a new world of Christian and American civilization. Reestablishing the original as such, I interpret the novel’s travel to 20th century China a historical event: an Imperialist novel goes by an Imperialism-fighting country in an Imperialist age. Therefore forces a long-ignored question: how had Chinese translators responded? How the response developed? This question can be best answered by looking into heinu yutian lu and heinu hen, two texts that represent respectively the beginning and the ending of Chinese critical treatment of the original in translating. And I will form my answer by analyzing the Chinese rewriting of the images of Uncle Tom and Harris, for they in the original are responsible for execution of the civilizing mission. Translating under a crucial circumstance of imperial crisis, Lin Shu and Wei Yi, the producers of heinu yutian lu, aimed to promote the ideology of “ loving the country and preserving the race”（??保种）.While presenting the black sufferings as faithful even exaggerated as possible, they consistently infiltrated the novel’s Christianity. And it is this strategy of de-Christianization that undermined the original’s imperialist design. After the translation, both Tom and Harris adopted a new face. The former was still a noble Negro only based on Chinese virtues, and the latter kept well his patriotic passion, but not for Christian civilization, rather purely for Africa. Intervention of the original’s civilizing mission climbed to a higher level as in the case of heinu hen, a drama adaptation by Ouyang yuqian in the radical 1960s. With Marxist class struggle being the guiding principle, Christian humanitarianism of the original was heavily criticized, and the black image reshaped dramatically. With Tom being portrayed as a slave that gradually woke up to his class consciousness, Harris was transformed into a revolutionary hero.
published_or_final_version
Chinese
Master
Master of Philosophy

The thesis investigates the sociological, cultural and ideological factors that affect the production and marketing of two major translations published in Fascist Italy and targeting both adult and young readers. The dissertation focuses upon a selected corpus of translations of the American novels, Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) and Little Women (1868), which were repeatedly translated between the 1920s and 1940s. By adopting an interdisciplinary approach, which encompasses fields such as the history of publishing, the sociology of translation, children’s literature, studies on the role and functions of the Paratext and scholarship on Fascism and its cultural policy, this study aims to offer a detailed examination of the Italian publishing market during the Ventennio. It probes the contexts informing the publishing history of these translations, their readerships, and interrelations with the growing importance of cinema, as well as questions related to the various retranslations produced. Furthermore, given the central role of publishing in the shaping of political consent and the contradictory attitude of the regime towards translations, this thesis explores ideological influences affecting selected translations of these novels that centre on issues of particular resonance for the regime, namely, race and gender. The dissertation is divided in two parallel sections, each one divided into three chapters. The opening chapters in each part examine the publishing history of Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Little Women respectively, with attention to the USA, the UK, and France and a primary focus upon Italy, above all Fascist Italy. The following chapters in each section investigate the role that the visual representations of these two books played in conveying racial and gender aspects and in contributing to the construction of their meaning by the readers. Finally, the closing chapters of each section are devoted to a translation analysis of selected passages in order to survey translational behaviours used to depict feminine and racial features, given that these were known to be especially problematic during the Ventennio. This survey aims to pinpoint norms informing translations targeting both young people and adults.

This dissertation charts the dramatic cultural transformation of Uncle Tom, the heroic Christian martyr of Harriet Beecher Stowe's antislavery novel Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), into a commonly known slur for a submissive race traitor. As many scholars have noted, the hero of Stowe's novel is not what we would today call an "Uncle Tom." Some have put the blame for the figure's drastic transformation on the many popular stage adaptations of Stowe's novel that blanketed the nation during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. However, relying on extensive archival work in both traditional archives and digitized historical periodicals, which have been unexamined on this topic until now, this dissertation reveals that Uncle Tom's transformation did not occur in the theater. Not only did the Uncle Tom character often retain his dignity in these postbellum shows, but the Uncle Tom's Cabin dramas remained politically relevant to many African Americans--and for that reason deeply threatening to many white Southerners--into the twentieth century. Significant objections to Uncle Tom as a racial representation in popular culture did not emerge until the late 1930s, but Uncle Tom became a detested political model two decades before that. The Christ-like qualities that made him a hero in Stowe's novel and to many nineteenth-century Americans, black and white, became increasingly undesirable to a new generation that embraced a more assertive understanding of masculinity and were less interested in heaven's salvation than in earthly progress. This turn-of-the-century transformation in cultural values set the stage for a more pointed critique of Uncle Tom as a political model in the 1910s, a decade of turmoil not only because of growing racial injustice, but also because of major political, educational, and geographical shifts within the race. While Uncle Tom's Cabin retained progressive meanings to many African Americans, Uncle Tom became a slur in the black political rhetoric of the 1910s, when a younger generation of leaders responded to the deteriorating racial climate by attacking the values and strategies of the older generation for seriously jeopardizing racial progress.

This dissertation is a social and cultural history about the ways that African Americans contributed to national debates about race, slavery, and emancipation by constructing and performing their own representations of slavery for the public. Scholars often portray these larger debates as a contest of ideas among whites, but African Americans played an important and still understudied role in shaping the white public’s understandings of race and slavery throughout the nineteenth century, especially in the North. Moving from from the 1830s to the early 1900s, my dissertation identifies several critical moments when African Americans, especially former slaves, gained new access to the public stage and seized opportunities to represent their own identities, histories, and experiences in different forums. Chapter One focuses on the unique contribution that fugitive slave activists made to the abolition movement. I place the published slave narratives in a larger performative context that includes public appearances and speeches; singing and dramatic readings; and oral testimony given in more private settings. In contrast to the sympathetic but frequently disempowering rhetoric of white abolitionists, fugitive activists used their performances to construct a positive representation of black manhood and womanhood that showed slaves not as benevolent objects in need of rescue but as strong men and women ready to enter freedom on equal terms. Chapter Two focuses on the Civil War, when runaway slaves had new opportunities to communicate their understandings of slavery and freedom to the Northerners who sent south during the war, as soldiers, missionaries, and aid workers. “Contraband” slaves’ testimony revealed the prevalence of violence and family separation, as well as slaves’ willingness to endure great hardship in pursuit of freedom. Contraband men and women also worked to publicly assert their new identities as freedpeople when they preemptively claimed the rights of citizenship and power over their own bodies. Their testimony and actions challenged white Northerners to embrace emancipation as an explicit Union war aim. Chapter Three of my dissertation examines black performance on the formal stage, 1865-1890s, by focusing on three groups of black performers: African American minstrels, the Hyers Sisters Dramatic Company, and the Fisk Jubilee Singers. Capitalizing on Northerners’ increased interest in slavery and “authentic” black performers, these groups offered their own representations of slavery and emancipation to the public, sometimes disrupting whites’ romanticized image of the “old plantation” in the process. During an era when the country moved toward reconciliation and reunion, these performances kept the issue of slavery before the public and, in some cases, contributed to an emancipationist memory of the war which challenged contemporary Northerners to protect the rights of freedpeople. My final chapter focuses on the autobiographies written and published by formerly enslaved women post-1865. My analysis of the women’s narratives as a body of work challenges the prevailing notion that post-bellum slave narratives were focused on regional reconciliation and the writer’s successful life in freedom. Women writers continued to remember and represent slavery as a brutal institution and revealed the ways that it continued to shape their lives in freedom, challenging contemporary images of the “old plantation” and devoted, self-sacrificing “Mammy.” Through their writing, these women represented African American women as central actors in stories of resistance, survival, and self-emancipation. With sustained attention to the deeply gendered nature of these representations, my dissertation sheds new light on the unique ways that African American women participated in these larger social debates and contributed to the public’s understanding of race and slavery before, during, and after the Civil War. Moving beyond the traditional periodization of U.S. slavery and emancipation and the typical focus on actors within a single, organized social movement, my project uncovers the breadth and diversity of African Americans’ public representations of slavery and freedom in contexts that were simultaneously social, cultural, and political. Using a broad range of published and unpublished archival materials, my work reveals African Americans’ distinct contribution to national debates regarding slavery’s place in the nation and the future of the men and women held within it.

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Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES)
Tradução e adaptação podem ser ferramentas de resistência para culturas e identidades não hegemônicas ou para a manutenção de formas de identificação e manifestações culturais dominantes no cenário mundial. Nesta dissertação, procuramos observar como uma adaptação e duas traduções brasileiras de A Cabana do Pai Tomás abordam questões de identificação e de narrativas raciais ao longo de um período de tempo (cerca de 60 anos) em que o paradigma tradicional do Brasil em relação à raça começa a ser questionado, em grande parte devido ao contato com as noções de raça dominantes na cultura estadunidense. Também observamos como a negociação, caracterizada por ser assimétrica e apropriadora, é aplicada nas reescritas selecionadas, e quais os ganhos e perdas advindos dos diferentes níveis de abertura ao diálogo com o Outro hegemônico na tradução e na adaptação. Para isso, foram selecionadas três reescritas da obra Uncle Tom's Cabin, de Harriet Beecher Stowe, para o português brasileiro. Levando em consideração a própria temática da obra – a escravidão nos EUA –, as questões raciais inevitavelmente entram em pauta no romance e, consequentemente, as reescritas são obrigadas a lidar com os discursos raciais e a representação de identidades raciais específicas, especialmente a identidade negra. Como os discursos raciais tradicionalmente apoiados nos Estados Unidos contrastam fortemente com a narrativa racial tradicional no Brasil, as reescritas acabam por refletir ideologias raciais condizentes com o discurso de sua época, mas que podem contrastar com os discursos umas das outras. Após reflexões sobre a natureza da tradução e da adaptação como reescritas literárias e das formas de identificação na pós-modernidade, em particular as identidades raciais, foram feitas análises comparativas entre trechos do original em inglês e das três reescritas selecionadas, de modo a observar nesses excertos questões pertinentes ao discurso racial veiculado a cada reescrita e à forma como a negociação entre as culturas norte-americana e brasileira se manifestou nas opções tradutórias apresentadas.
Translation and adaptation can either represent tools of resistance for non-hegemonic cultures and identities, or tools for hegemonic identities and cultures to maintain power in a global level. This dissertation aims to observe how a Brazilian adaptation and two Brazilian translations of Uncle Tom’s Cabin deal with matters of racial identity and racial narratives spanning a period (roughly 60 years) in which the traditional Brazilian paradigm about race started to shift, in great part due to contact with concepts of race prevalent in American culture. We observed how negotiation, an approach characterized by its asymmetry and appropriative nature, acts in the selected rewritings, and which gains and losses happen when said rewritings allow varying degrees of contact with a hegemonic Other in translation and literary adaptation. With this goal, three rewritings of Uncle Tom's Cabin, by Harriet Beecher Stowe, to Brazilian Portuguese were chosen. Considering the main theme of the novel – slavery in the United Stated– racial matters inevitably come to the forefront of discussion, and therefore the rewritings have to deal with racial discourses and the representation of specific racial identities, especially black identity. Since the racial discourses traditionally associated with the United States differ significantly from the racial narrative traditional in Brazil, the rewritings can’t help but reflect racial ideologies matching the discourses prevalent at their time; however, those discourses may contrast with the discourse of the remaining rewritings. After reflecting upon the nature of translation and literary adaptation as literary rewritings and upon the formation of identities in post-modern times, racial identities in particular, we compared and analyzed excerpts of the original novel and the three selected rewritings, in order to observe in those passages matters related to the racial discourse associated with each rewriting, and the way negotiation between American and Brazilian cultures made itself known in the translation options presented.

Orientador: Lauro Maia Amorim
Banca: Lenita Esteves
Banca: Álvaro Luiz Hattnher
Resumo: Tradução e adaptação podem ser ferramentas de resistência para culturas e identidades não hegemônicas ou para a manutenção de formas de identificação e manifestações culturais dominantes no cenário mundial. Nesta dissertação, procuramos observar como uma adaptação e duas traduções brasileiras de A Cabana do Pai Tomás abordam questões de identificação e de narrativas raciais ao longo de um período de tempo (cerca de 60 anos) em que o paradigma tradicional do Brasil em relação à raça começa a ser questionado, em grande parte devido ao contato com as noções de raça dominantes na cultura estadunidense. Também observamos como a negociação, caracterizada por ser assimétrica e apropriadora, é aplicada nas reescritas selecionadas, e quais os ganhos e perdas advindos dos diferentes níveis de abertura ao diálogo com o Outro hegemônico na tradução e na adaptação. Para isso, foram selecionadas três reescritas da obra Uncle Tom's Cabin, de Harriet Beecher Stowe, para o português brasileiro. Levando em consideração a própria temática da obra - a escravidão nos EUA -, as questões raciais inevitavelmente entram em pauta no romance e, consequentemente, as reescritas são obrigadas a lidar com os discursos raciais e a representação de identidades raciais específicas, especialmente a identidade negra. Como os discursos raciais tradicionalmente apoiados nos Estados Unidos contrastam fortemente com a narrativa racial tradicional no Brasil, as reescritas acabam por refletir ideologias raciais...
Abstract: Translation and adaptation can either represent tools of resistance for non-hegemonic cultures and identities, or tools for hegemonic identities and cultures to maintain power in a global level. This dissertation aims to observe how a Brazilian adaptation and two Brazilian translations of Uncle Tom's Cabin deal with matters of racial identity and racial narratives spanning a period (roughly 60 years) in which the traditional Brazilian paradigm about race started to shift, in great part due to contact with concepts of race prevalent in American culture. We observed how negotiation, an approach characterized by its asymmetry and appropriative nature, acts in the selected rewritings, and which gains and losses happen when said rewritings allow varying degrees of contact with a hegemonic Other in translation and literary adaptation. With this goal, three rewritings of Uncle Tom's Cabin, by Harriet Beecher Stowe, to Brazilian Portuguese were chosen. Considering the main theme of the novel - slavery in the United Stated- racial matters inevitably come to the forefront of discussion, and therefore the rewritings have to deal with racial discourses and the representation of specific racial identities, especially black identity. Since the racial discourses traditionally associated with the United States differ significantly from the racial narrative traditional in Brazil, the rewritings can't help but reflect racial ideologies matching the discourses prevalent at their time; however, ...
Mestre

Cette recherche se situe dans le cadre de l'histoire du livre. Il s'agit d'etudier pourquoi et comment uncle tom's cabin, roman anti-esclavagiste de harriet beecher stowe, est redige, publie en feuilleton et en livre, puis reedite et presente au public americain de 1852 a 1999. En amont de la publication, ce travail examine les debuts de carriere de stowe, la genese du roman, et l'interaction entre l'auteur, l'editeur et le lecteur dans la creation du feuilleton. La publication en livre est replacee dans le contexte de la periode de transition que connait l'edition americaine au milieu du dix-neuvieme siecle. Elle inclut les negociations avec le premier editeur et la promotion du roman. Entre 1852 et 1878, le paratexte auctorial (prefaces, postfaces et introductions) uncle tom's cabin estun lieu de dialogue entre auteur, lecteur et critique. Il induit des protocoles de lecture qui varient en fonction du public cible, et revele l'evolution du regard que l'auteur porte a son oeuvre. L'etude detaillee du nombre d'editions et des chiffres de vente pendant la periode de duree du copyright (18521893) fait ressortir les variations de la popularite du roman et l'evolution du statut du texte. Elle indique le role essentiel des strategies editoriales. La part jouee par l'auteur dans le suivi du roman se degage de l'examen des rapports entre l'auteur et l'editeur. Les fluctuations de la popularite du roman de 1893 a 1999 s'expliquent en partie a la lecture des paratextes editorial et allographe. Ceux-ci revelent les bouleversements de la societe et les grands mouvements d'idees. A travers la place et le role que le paratexte assigne au texte au fil des editions, le texte apparait comme un objet culturel, que chaque generation s'approprie et relit a sa facon. En exposant la nature proteiforme et polysemique du texte, le paratexte contribue par ailleurs a expliquer son caractere controverse.

The purpose of this thesis is to analyse the representation of authorship, readership and intertextuality in Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin and the southern anti-Tom tradition from 1852 to 1902. The principal claim of the thesis is that Stowe's novel provides nineteenth-century southern readers with a series of aesthetic paradigms that enable these readers to construct and reconstruct the role of artist in the South as this intersects with the construction of gender identity in nineteenth-century America. In Chapter 1, Uncle Tom's Cabin is interpreted through Julia Kristeva's theory of intertextuality, whereby 'the one who writes is the same as the one who reads', to argue that Stowe's text promotes acts of active rather than passive readership. The reading of Caroline Lee Hentz's The Planter's Northern Bride in Chapter 2 interrogates the ways in which the female writer locates herself within a female literary tradition by subverting the Bloomian model of literary paternity to create the gothic mother author. Chapter 3 demonstrates how William Gilmore Simms appropriates Stowe's aesthetics of sympathy in the 'sensible man'. Barthes's recapitulation of the writer and reader as 'producer' and 'consumer' is mapped onto Simms's aesthetic terminology of 'utility' and 'extravagance' to reconcile Stowe's antithesis of marketplace and sentiment within the southern home. In Chapter 4, James Lane Allen's paired stories 'Mrs Stowe's "Uncle Tom" at Home in Kentucky' and 'Two Gentlemen of Kentucky' are read in the context of the literary debates between realism and romance in the late nineteenth-century. In doing so, Allen attempts to reconfigure these gendered aesthetic paradigms and so legitimise southern cultural elegy as a southern form but effectively begins the process of dismantling Stowe's aesthetics of sympathy. Chapter 5 discusses the ways in which Thomas Dixon's The Leopard's Spots dramatises the failure of Stowe's aesthetics of sympathy in the context of the southern rape complex.

Texts such as Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, and Nella Larsen’s Quicksand each present a different understanding and perspective of relationships based on their time periods and social statures. The type of relationship Stowe focuses on in her novel is that of friendship. Friends, defined as people with whom have a bond of mutual affection, and friendships, the state of mutual trust and support (Merriam-Webster), anchor the relationships that Eva and Eliza create with members on the plantation. These female protagonists turn to friendship as a way to live each day more normally – that is, to somehow alleviate the brutal cruelty of living through slavery. Despite varying odds, trials, and tribulations, seeking friendships that had preservative and supportive qualities allowed the female protagonists in Stowe’s novel to survive their own lives. The friendships Eva and Eliza formed discredit what many paternalist pro-slavery authors used as evidence to justify the institution of slavery. In the paternalist proslavery mindset, slave-owner and slave friendships revealed the benefits of slavery – that the two groups would be happier together rather than apart. Stowe discredits this mentality by relating to her 19th century reader’s emotions, representative of the sentimental genre in which she writes. However, in writing about slavery from a white woman’s perspective, Stowe isn’t fully exempt from the paternalist genre. As I will examine later, many of her statements about slavery and the friendships she narrates embody implicitly racist stereotypes and caricatures that complicate the abolitionist approach to her novel. In this way, she falls under the category of paternalist abolitionism, rather than paternalist proslavery. Stowe also highlights the fleeting nature of these friendships. Many, if not all, of the friendships Eva and Eliza form are not able to last, which is one way Stowe argues against the institution of slavery. Following Stowe, my discussion of Jacobs will introduce a slave’s perspective to female relationships in slavery. The relationships in Jacobs’ narrative are centered on family, and the power of relying on one’s own blood or close-knit community to survive slavery. Writing also within the sentimental mode, Jacobs focuses on her reader’s emotions in order to propel her anti-slavery argument. The female relationships Jacobs details are grounded in literal and metaphorical motherhood. She highlights these relationships as an emotional and familial, particularly motherly, survival method. Jacobs’ text showcases the importance of family, rather the relationships or friendships formed with strangers– thereby differentiating her argument from Stowe’s. Nella Larsen’s Quicksand draws on the emotional and social difficulties one biracial woman faced in a world affected by the legacy of slavery and World War I. As a biracial woman, Helga develops relationships with men and women she hopes will support her progressive way of thinking and sense of selfhood. Helga’s relationships are more aptly defined as partnerships – given that “partners” may involve sexual, non-sexual, and business-like dynamics between two people. Helga must find authentic, or non-hypocritical, people to assist in her journey for selfhood and kin. But similarly to the relationships in Stowe and Jacobs, the friendships Helga creates often fail her. The question of why they fail in Quicksand connects directly to the question the novel itself is asking: is the search for selfhood more important than the search for kin? The argument all three works make with these failures represents a call to action – not just for the time period in which their novels were written, but also for future American communities. The continuing consequences of racial and gender discrimination exposed by Stowe, Jacobs, and Larsen show us that real social change must come from people – from the relationships we form.

Detractors of sentimental literature argue that such novels are unoriginal and concerned primarily with emotions. Feminist scholars redeem the reputation of sentimental literature to an extent. At present, a multitude of approaches present sentimental authors as active agents, engaging with public issues. Building upon the scholarship of prominent feminist historians and literary critics, this thesis provides direct evidence that three female authors embrace the responsibilities of being a social critic. The Wide, Wide World (1850) by Susan Warner, Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1851) by Harriet Beecher Stowe, and The Hidden Hand (1859) by Emma D.E.N. Southworth provide unique commentaries on the separation of the private and public spheres, market revolution, and religion. Decisive differences between the authors’ opinions reveal a high degree of engagement with the public issues.

Toni Morrison, in Playing in the Dark, observes the pervasive silence that surrounds race in nineteenth-century canonical literature. Observing the ways in which the “Africanist” African-American presence pervades this literature, Morrison has called for an investigation of the ways in which whiteness operates in American canonical literature. This thesis takes up that challenge. In the first section, from Chapters One through Three, I explore how whiteness operates through the representation of the African-American figure in the works of three eminent nineteenth-century American writers, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Walt Whitman, and Mark Twain. The texts studied in this regard are: Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Leaves of Grass, and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. This section is not concerned with whether these texts constitute racist literature but with the ways in which the study of race, particularly whiteness, reveals the contradictions and insecurities that attend (white American) identity. As such, Morrison’s own fiction, written in response to white historical representations of African-Americans also deserves attention. The second section of this thesis focuses on Morrison’s attempt to produce an authentically “black” literature. Here I look at two of Morrison’s least studied but arguably most contentious novels particularly because of what they reveal of Morrison’s complex position on race. In Chapter Four I focus on Tar Baby and argue that this novel reveals Morrison’s somewhat essentialist position on blackness and racial, cultural, and gendered identity, particularly as this pertains to responsibilities she places on the black woman as culture-bearer. In Chapter Five I argue that Paradise, while taking a particularly challenging position on blackness, reveals Morrison’s evolving position on race, particularly her concern with the destructive nature of internalized racism. This thesis concludes that while racial identities have very real material consequences, whiteness and blackness are ideological and social constructs which, because of their constructedness, are fallible and perpetually under revision.

碩士
國立中興大學
外國語文學系所
102
English Abstract That the concept of Divine Providence holds a central place in US American civil religion and played an especially important role in the debate about the abolition of slavery is generally acknowledged. This thesis attempts to show how this concept informs Harriet Beecher Stowe’s view of slavery in Uncle Tom’s Cabin. After surveying the history of theological debates about Divine Providence, the thesis examines Stowe’s critique of religious defenses of slavery, and goes on to relate this to her challenge to the sort of orthodox Calvinism represented by her father. Stowe herself advocated a more liberal, feminized theology of an Arminian cast. Her political strategy in Uncle Tom’s Cabin must be understood in the context of these theological views. Stowe’s novel is a powerful reminder of the importance which religion has played, and continues to play, in US American history and culture.

O romance anti-escravatura Uncle Tom’s Cabin, de Harriet Beecher Stowe, é um dos textos mais famosos do século XIX e teve um tremendo impacto social, político e cultural em todo o mundo, incluindo em Portugal. A presente dissertação consiste numa análise comparativa de capítulos selecionados de duas traduções portuguesas de Uncle Tom’s Cabin: uma tradução de 1853 (uma das primeiras a ser publicada em Portugal, apenas um ano depois da publicação do romance nos Estados Unidos) e uma tradução de 2005 (a tradução portuguesa mais recente). As disciplinas de Estudos de Tradução e da História da Tradução serviram de enquadramento teórico a esta análise comparativa, que se foca em três aspectos concretos: a proximidade ao texto de partida, a tradução de dialectos e a tradução de linguagem tabu. Este trabalho tem um impulso hermenêutico e não meramente descritivo, uma vez que se pretende interpretar as diferenças e semelhanças entre as duas traduções e relacioná-las com o contexto em que estas foram produzidas, publicadas e lidas. O objectivo principal é, portanto, compreender como Uncle Tom’s Cabin foi traduzido e recebido em Portugal em momentos históricos muito diferentes e como estes processos de mudança se manifestam através da tradução.
Harriet Beecher Stowe’s anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin is one of the most famous texts from the 19th century and it has had a tremendous social, political, and cultural impact around the world, including in Portugal. This dissertation consists in a comparative analysis of selected chapters taken from two Portuguese translations of Uncle Tom’s Cabin: a translation from 1853 (one of the first to be published in Portugal, only a year after the novel was first published in the United States) and a translation from 2005 (the most recent Portuguese translation). In terms of theory, the fields of Translation Studies and Translation History will serve as the framework for this comparative analysis, which will focus on three specific aspects: proximity to the source text, the translation of dialects, and the translation of taboo language. The impulse behind this work is not only descriptive but hermeneutic, since it intends to interpret the differences and similarities between the two translations, and relate them to the context in which they were produced, published, and read. Our main objective is therefore to understand how Uncle Tom’s Cabin was translated and received in Portugal in two different time periods and how these processes of change are manifested through translation.