Eric J. Sundquist ist Professor für Literatur, dessen Werk sich mit den komplexen Zusammenhängen zwischen Rasse, Identität und der Entwicklung der amerikanischen Literatur und Kultur beschäftigt. Er untersucht kritisch, wie literarische Werke komplexe Beziehungen zwischen Gruppen widerspiegeln und die nationale Identität prägen. Sundquists wissenschaftliche Arbeit bietet tiefe Einblicke in die kulturellen und historischen Kontexte, die die amerikanische Literaturtradition beeinflusst haben. Sein Ansatz beleuchtet die anhaltende Kraft der Literatur, die amerikanische Erfahrung zu erforschen und zu definieren.
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the novel with a collection of speeches, essays, folktales, historical analyses, photographs, and other cultural and historical documents.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.