- •1. Identify several ways in which Leaves of Grass is quintessentially American.
- •2. Explain how Whitman incorporates the idea of democracy into his poetry.
- •Identify some of the sexual taboos Whitman broached in his poetry.
- •3.Explain how Whitman's wartime experience affected his sense of comradeship.
- •2. Explain the role of the city in the Whitmanesque notion of human bonding.
- •1. Give examples of different traditions of death that Whitman draws from.
- •2. Explain the relationship between poetry and death in "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking".
- •1. Describe the range of Whitman as the poet of nature.
- •2. Summarize Whitman's ambivalent relationship with the idea of American democracy.
- •1. Summarize why so many critics have accorded Stowe second class status as a 19th-century novelist.
- •2. Explain whether Stowe's attitudes toward race seem dated or prophetic.
- •3. Summarize how Uncle Tom's Cabin is a religious allegory.
2. Explain whether Stowe's attitudes toward race seem dated or prophetic.
Candid about the attitudes in both the North and the South concerning slavery and race. In particular, we discover how one group can be both proslavery and fond of blacks, whereas the other is abolitionist but condescending and squeamish in its attitude toward blacks.
Stowe ultimately opts for an "African" solution to her story of racial injustice, and this scheme reflects an anxiety about miscegenation (blacks and whites living together) that runs throughout much American literature, with high points in Faulkner, Ellison, and Morrison.
3. Summarize how Uncle Tom's Cabin is a religious allegory.
Uncle Tom's Cabin has been written off, for much of the 20th century, as "sentimental." Certain episodes such as Tom's suffering at the hands of Simon Legree, Eliza fleeing over the ice, and little Eva's tearful death remain in our minds as virtually mythic events.
Uncle Tom's Cabin is famous for its depiction of the evils of slavery, yet its view of race is notoriously uneven and warrants a careful look. Stowe puts on the stage an assortment of people of color. We cannot fail to see the differences between her full-blooded black characters who speak in dialect and are almost portrayed as actors in a minstrel show and her mulatto characters who are virtually white-skinned, have European manners, and can "pass."