[aothman]

Uncle Tom's Cabin is an awful book. First off, it's boring and damn near unreadable (it was one of the only assigned books I never made it through in college). But in a larger sense, the slaves are "heroic" and "emotionally nuanced" only in the sense that HBS makes them fulfill a racial type: sympathetic, penitent, long-suffering Christians. They're treated more as people than as property, but more as caricatures than as people.

The interesting contradiction of UTC, to me, is that it had this enormous significance to history despite being terribly written. As a modern reader, I couldn't get any emotion about the book other than it being terrible. James Baldwin trashes the book brutally but fairly in his great essay "Everybody's Protest Novel": http://www.uhu.es/antonia.dominguez/semnorteamericana/protes...