Literature and Liberation

When Abraham Lincoln finally met Harriet Beecher Stowe, the author of the best-selling novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), he is reported to have said: “So, this is the little lady that started the Civil War.” Published only one decade later, but a whole world away, Nikolai Chernyshevsky’s controversial novel What is to be Done? (1863) has been described as the single work that “supplied the emotional dynamic that eventually went to make the Russian Revolution.” In this course we will focus on these two novels that exerted an immense impact on society, had a powerful effect on human lives, and demonstrate the power to make history.