"The chapter titles are revealing here..."

 30 June 2022: Had one of those very cool "oh, I never thought of that before! that's so smart!" moments while reading criticism this morning. Here's John C. Havard in a piece about realism (and typology) in Uncle Tom's Cabin: 

“The chapter titles are revealing here: whereas early titles tend to be descriptive, such as ‘An Evening in Uncle Tom’s Cabin,’ ‘Select Incident of a Lawful Trade,’ and ‘Tom’s Mistress and Her Opinions,’ the chapters after the book’s midpoint take on increasingly figurative, typological titles, such as ‘The Grass Withereth—The Flower Fadeth,’ ‘The Little Evangelist,’ and ‘The Martyr.’ Through this narrative structure, the novel forces the reader to consider the concluding typological passages in the context of the imagined national community that Stowe had evoked in the earlier, more realist sections” (258).

I really love some of Stowe's chapter titles (and get nerdy about chapter titles in general), so this hit my sweet spot. 

Work Cited

Havard, John C. “Fighting Slavery by ‘Presenting Facts in Detail’: Realism, Typology, and Temporality in Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” American Literary Realism, vol. 44, no. 3, 2012, pp. 249–66. EBSCOhost.