Research Paper on:
Comparision of 'Bartleby the Scrivener' by Herman Melville and Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe

Unformatted Sample Text from the Research Paper:
Scrivener. His contemporary, Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-96) is equally well-known for her novel that was truly inflammatory for its time, Uncle Toms Cabin (1852). It is a story which Abraham  Lincoln supposedly credited its author with having started the Civil War. In each story, the reader experiences what is truly a unique American perspective in terms of how the natural  world operates, how people of their time period interacted, and what the most basic realities of life were in 19th century America. Comparing Bartleby and Uncle Tom Both Melville and  Stowe were able to encapsulate many more sensibilities and awarenesses in their characters than would be readily evident in the story of an old "Negro" slave or the story being  told by a "rather elderly man" about a "law-copyist or scrivener" named Bartleby (Bartleby the Scrivener). What they offer readers more than a century after they told their stories is  an insight to who these characters are and the ways in which they represent the attitudes of the people they knew during their lifetimes. Interestingly, they each use a very  different voice to portray a certain measure of universality in terms of how certain ideas and forms of life as well as personal morality were simply accepted, not questioned during  their lives. Because American society as a whole had become better educated by the mid-19th century, a new market presented itself for stories, regional sketches, novels and other types  of publications. Local-color writers of amusing, uplifting, or enlightening stories helped satisfy the voracious demands of the new "literary" market. Interestingly, regional fiction actually began before the Civil War but  Harriet Beecher Stowe provided an example of the most popular type of fiction of the day with her New England short stories and novels that pre-dated Uncle Toms Cabin which