Joy Jordan-Lake examines the ways in which antebellum women novelists tried to counter Harriet Beecher Stowes enormously popular Uncle Toms Cabin by preaching a theology of whiteness from within the pages of the books - but were ultimately undermined by their own proslavery agendas. Including a discussion of twentieth- and twenty-first-century novels that revisit plantation mythology, Whitewashing Uncle Toms Cabin casts new light on the ethical and moral disaster of securing one groups economic strength at the expense of other groups access to dignity, compassion, and justice.
