Eric J. Sundquist est professeur de littérature, dont le travail explore les liens complexes entre la race, l'identité et le développement de la littérature et de la culture américaines. Il examine de manière critique comment les œuvres littéraires reflètent des relations intergroupes complexes et façonnent l'identité nationale. Les travaux universitaires de Sundquist offrent des perspectives profondes sur les contextes culturels et historiques qui ont influencé les traditions littéraires américaines. Son approche illumine le pouvoir durable de la littérature pour explorer et définir l'expérience américaine.
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the novel with a collection of speeches, essays, folktales, historical analyses, photographs, and other cultural and historical documents.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.