Introduction / Eric J. Sundquist -- Strategies of black characterization in Uncle Tom's cabin and the early Afro-American novel / Richard Yarborough -- Doing it herself: Uncle Tom's cabin and woman's role in the slavery crisis / Jean Fagan Yellin -- Gothic imagination and social reform: the haunted houses of Lyman Beecher, Henry Ward Beecher, and Harriet Beecher Stowe / Karen Halttunen -- Sharing the thunder: the literary exchanges of Harriet Beecher Stowe, Henry Bibb, and Frederick Douglass / Robert B. Stepto -- Stowe's dream of the mother-savior: Uncle Tom's cabin and American women writers before the 1920's / Elizabeth Ammons.