Criticism > Contemporary Literary Criticism > Banks, Russell - Joyce Appleby (review date 22 May 1998)

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Joyce Appleby (review date 22 May 1998)

SOURCE: Appleby, Joyce. “After Harpers Ferry.” Times Literary Supplement, no. 4964 (22 May 1998): 7.

[In the following review, Appleby derides the character of Owen, the narrator of Cloudsplitter, contending that Banks asks the character to do too much within the novel.]

Slavery and its legacies have never been far from the American political consciousness. The Boston town meeting called to protest against the British Stamp Act in 1765 passed a resolution calling for an end to slavery, so keenly did the protesters feel the contradiction between the much-talked-of rights of Englishmen and the colonists' enslavement of Africans. Once independence had been won, anti-slavery societies popped up everywhere—North and South. Taking seriously the natural-rights philosophy articulated in the Declaration of Independence, Northern reformers began agitating for the repeal of the state laws that had...

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1. Introduction
2. Principal Works
3. Criticism
   1. Howard Frank Mosher (review date 8 September 1991)
   2. Jeff Danziger (review date 24 September 1991)
   3. Donna Rifkind (review date 17 April 1992)
   4. James Finn Cotter (review date 2 May 1992)
   5. Ross Leckie (essay date summer 1994)
   6. Richard Eder (review date 21 May 1995)
   7. Ann Hulbert (review date 29 May 1995)
   8. Penelope Mesic (review date 11 June 1995)
   9. Phil Baker (review date 30 June 1995)
   10. Brian Morton (review date 7 July 1995)
   11. Ed Peaco (review date fall 1995)
   12. Jerry Herron (essay date fall 1996)
   13. Robert Niemi (essay date 1997)
   14. Henry Mayer (review date 8 March 1998)
   15. Russell Banks and Christine Benvenuto (interview date March-April 1998)
   16. Alfred Kazin (review date 9 April 1998)
   17. Lawrence Hill (review date 13 April 1998)
   18. James M. McPherson (review date May 1998)
   19. Joyce Appleby (review date 22 May 1998)
   20. Russell Banks, Robert Faggen, and Barry Munger (interview date summer 1998)
   21. Millicent Bell (review date fall 1998)
   22. Paul Binding (review date 15 September 2000)
   23. Kathleen Snodgrass (review date spring 2001)
4. Further Reading
5. Copyright