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Special Issue Articles

Vol. 6 No. 2 (2025): Versions of America: Speculative Pasts, Presents, Futures

Cabin Fever, or: Back to the Future? The (Anti-)Pastoral in Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) and Walden (1854)

Submitted
October 14, 2024
Published
2025-06-18

Abstract

Canonized classics of US-American literature such as Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly and Henry David Thoreau's Walden; or, Life in the Woods were published at the beginning of the 1850s – that crucial moment in the history of the United States when it found itself on the brink of the Civil War. Both works epitomize the nation's contemporaneous racial climate, i.e. the legacy and workings of the institution of slavery, in the simple material form of the cabin. Deploying the theoretical frame of the pastoral, essentially qualified by the anti-pastoral (Bennett, M. 195–210) and the strategic pastoral (Klestil 85–124), this article argues that Stowe and Thoreau materialize the past and presence of slavery in the cabin in order to explicitly (Uncle Tom's Cabin) or implicitly (Walden) imagine and speculate about a future nation without slavery. This article hence compares and historicizes two defining literary versions of a United States the cultural influence and power of which are rooted in their respective depiction of the cabin as "both icon and shelter" (Hoagland 8).

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