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Disability, Reactionary Appropriation, and Strategies of Manipulation in Simms's Woodcraft

Disability, Reactionary Appropriation, and Strategies of Manipulation in Simms's Woodcraft 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 http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png The Southern Literary Journal University of North Carolina Press

Disability, Reactionary Appropriation, and Strategies of Manipulation in Simms's Woodcraft

The Southern Literary Journal , Volume 45 (2) – Jul 12, 2013

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Publisher
University of North Carolina Press
Copyright
Copyright © 2008 the Southern Literary Journal and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Department of English.
ISSN
1534-1461

Abstract

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

Journal

The Southern Literary JournalUniversity of North Carolina Press

Published: Jul 12, 2013

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