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Disability, Reactionary Appropriation, and Strategies of Manipulation in Simms’s Woodcraft by Taylor Hagood One of the most useful things about studying a politically reac- tionary text such as William Gilmore Simms’s Woodcraft: Or, Hawks About the Dovecoat is that doing so can reveal the rhetorical maneuvers used to convey and promote its ideological platform. Scholars have long considered Woodcraft to be an “anti- Tom” novel designed to counteract the powerful depiction of slavery as a social and cultural evil in Har- riet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. What has not been sufficiently analyzed are the narrative and rhetorical strategies Simms employs to defend race- based slavery in the United States. A particularly productive approach to identifying and understanding these strategies is that of dis- ability studies, with its relentless efforts to expose constructs of normal - ity in the context of politics surrounding the human body. What such an approach makes clear is how central corporeality is to the novel’s rhetori- cal, political, and thematic fabric. Specic fi ally, Simms uses disability and abnormality to manipulate the reader into moral conflicts designed to normalize slavery and the white southern aristocracy’s values, a maneu- vering that has the ultimate effect
The Southern Literary Journal – University of North Carolina Press
Published: Jul 12, 2013
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