Paper short abstract:

Despite huge success in the US and Europe, little attention has been given to the reception of Uncle Tom’s Cabin in Brazil. This paper will discuss the differing ways in which Brazilians responded to the novel, focusing on two anti-slavery texts from the 1850s that reveal the influence of Uncle Tom.

Paper long abstract:

In the years immediately following its publication, Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel enjoyed huge popularity and influence, and received an arguably even warmer welcome in Europe. Uncle Tom's reception in Brazil, however, appears to have been decidedly more muted, perhaps not surprisingly given the social conditions and prevailing attitudes towards slavery in 1850s Brazil, still 35 years from abolition.

No doubt as a result of this limited early engagement with the novel, very little scholarly attention has been paid to the influence of Uncle Tom's Cabin on anti-slavery discourse in Brazil. In this paper I will outline some of the differing ways in which Brazilians responded both to the figure of Harriet Beecher Stowe and to the characters and events of her famous novel. In particular, I will discuss two of the most interesting pieces of fiction to overtly address the subject of slavery in Brazil during the 1850s, both of which, I suggest, reveal the clear influence of Uncle Tom.

It is certainly of interest, and significance, to note that both of these little-known texts were written by women. What makes a reading of them particularly interesting, though, is that whilst both authors appear to have taken inspiration from the acclaim and influence won by Beecher Stowe and her book, their own social and racial backgrounds fundamentally shaped their re-workings of Tom, resulting in two markedly different texts.