Are there polls here yet

These thoughts are all still fresh, so I'm not sure how much they bear out, but Uncle Tom's Cabin seemed a lot more disjointed this time around, so it's hard to say it's doing the thing (aesthetically, I think, but maybe politically too) that we often refer to in our account of her sentimentality.

So I guess the joke about being gaslit is that I think there is the account we've received of why Stowe is "bad" (politically, aesthetically, etc.), but there are many parts where she seems to do something quite different and maybe better (aesthetically if not politically) from those accounts.

Ah, I see what you mean. I guess what I mean by gaslighting is that there are parts that I find great and even difficult to wrestle with—especially St. Clare's speech, and in this reading, I was stuck on the Prue sequence—but those passages seem almost distinct form the rest of the novel.

I'm coming around to it! I'm auditing a course in which we just read it, and the discussion has been making me reconsider some opinions on Stowe. I think there are many parts that are truly extraordinary (especially in the final third) but a lot of it leaves much to be desired.

You’re correct, but if posting this is wrong, I don’t want to feel right

I share an office with a 18c novel scholar, and this means I don’t have to read Clarissa because just ask questions whenever it seems relevant.

Time to reread the second best novel of the twentieth century (Contending Forces)

Champion of two centuries

Contending Forces (1900)!

In the opening year of the century we had Sister Carrie and Marrow, and then after that nothing but decline