The Grammar of Good Intentions

Bücher

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Ryan puts familiar literary works such as Herman Melville's "The Confidence-Man", Frederick Douglass's "My Bondage and My Freedom", and Harriet Beecher Stowe's "Uncle Tom's Cabin" back into dialogue with a broad range of print materials: the reports of charity societies, African American and Native American newspapers, juvenile fiction, travel writing, cartoons, sermons and tract literature. In the process, she dispels the myth that authors usually classified as literary were responding to a simple and unquestioned cult of benevolence. Rather, she contends, they were participating in the complex and often rancorous debates occurring within the broader culture over how good intentions should be expressed and enacted.