Eric J. Sundquist is a professor of literature whose work delves into the intricate connections between race, identity, and the development of American literature and culture. He critically examines how literary works reflect complex intergroup relationships and shape national identity. Sundquist's scholarship offers profound insights into the cultural and historical contexts that have influenced American literary traditions. His approach illuminates the enduring power of literature to explore and define the American experience.
Sundquist's approach to the texts is psychoanalytic, but he does not attempt a clinical dissection of each writer; rather, he determines how personal crisis became material for engaging with larger questions of social and literary crisis.
02 A unique supplement to one of the most important African American novels of this century. As Invisible Man chronicles the major moments of African American life during the first half of the twentieth century, this volume illuminates and contextualizes the novel with a collection of speeches, essays, folktales, historical analyses, photographs, and other cultural and historical documents.
Increased interest in the role of women and minorities in establishing the canon of American literature has led to renewed interest in Uncle Tom's Cabin. The essays in this volume set out to provide contemporary readers with a critical and historical interpretation of the novel that reflects the best of recent scholarship. In his introduction Eric J. Sundquist attempts to show that Uncle Tom's Cabin boldly takes issue with both proslavery arguments and prevailing prejudices among abolitionists, employing the forms of popular melodrama and heated rhetoric to carry its complex argument. The individual essays examine the influence of Stowe's novel on the characterization of women in the American novel and on later women writers, the role of women in the antislavery movement, the literary exchanges between Stowe and her contemporaries; Uncle Tom's Cabin and the tradition of the Gothic novel, and the characterizations of blacks in this novel and in later works.