Uncle Tom's Cabin encouraged its readers to feel that despair at the death of a child was a natural rather than a self-indulgent r
Promoting a behaviour that challenged the social norm around mourning the death of a child created by the Church.
4 Matching Annotations
- Jan 2019
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inative recasting of Scripture anticipates one of the biggest problems she herself would encounter while writing her novel: how to treat serious issues of religious faith and historical reality in a nar- rative form widely presumed to encourage romantic fantasy, passivity, and idlene
Readers have different expectations for different writing styles. This shows how bold and radical Stowe was in taking on the challenge of writing her piece in the style of fiction.
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By con- trast, the Era placed poems and serialized fiction in a prominent position on page one. Spread out over two, three, and even four columns, the fiction and poetry of the Era was not separated from the news in a clearly labeled column at the back; it was interlaced with readers' letters, congressional debates, political speeches, and news repor
It's interesting how the National Era took a different approach to structuring their print issues than the rest of abolitionist press at the time. By highlighting poems and fiction throughout their paper rather than just at the back, this can strengthen the value of literary art to readers who may have at first only regarded journalism as the single reputable format to communicate abolitionist information to them.
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"defamiliarization": how to tell a well-known tale so as to "make it new."4
The ability to take a well known social issue like the slave trade and present it in a different way than it has been throughout history (rendering it unfamiliar to readers), brings a new light to the topic and can be very powerful in magnifying public perception.
I see this concept carried over into a lot of the publishing produced today in a variety of ways. I've even came across a post on the internet that I think used defamiliarization to describe Disney movies in a disturbing way: "Girl kidnapped by a man driven insane by his grotesque disfigurement grows to love her captor in a case study of Stockholm Syndrome." (Beauty and the Beast)
Using defamiliarization in writing helps us to truly see a story or idea again, since we may have become desensitized to it from seeing it on a daily basis.
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