Alexandra Urakova,“‘ I do not want her, I am sure’: Commodities, Gifts, and Poisonous Gifts in Uncle Tom’s Cabin ” (pp. 448–472) This essay focuses on Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) in discussing the interrelation of sentimentality, slavery, and race. It asks what happens when a slave himself or herself becomes a gift in the way that Mr. Shelby buys Eliza as a present for his wife, and St. Claire seems to bestow Uncle Tom upon Eva and ultimately gives Topsy to his cousin Ophelia. Although much has been said about “sentimental property” or “sympathetic ownership” in Stowe, the instances of exchanging slaves as gifts in the novel have been surprisingly overlooked. Touching upon one of the novel’s important and precarious themes—the distinction between people and things—the aforementioned episodes not only contribute to our understanding of the novel’s gift economy but also invite us to revise the complex attitude to racial otherness in Uncle Tom’s Cabin . I claim that while pursuing a sentimental ideology of the gift that comes to support racialist implications of its abolitionist rhetoric, Stowe’s novel also contains a radical potential of its critique embodied in the image of the poisonous gift of a slave child, Topsy, who figures as an unwelcome, wasteful, and repellent present. Concurring with critical opinion that Stowe’s racism is in the sentiment, this essay suggests that the novel’s unsentimental, explicitly racist metaphors paradoxically inform one of Stowe’s strongest antislavery arguments.

The essay returns Edgar Allan Poe's "The Purloined Letter" to The Gift: A Christmas, New Year, and Birthday Present, 1845 , the gift book in which it was originally published, in order to explore its relationship to its apparently arbitrary frame. Correspondences among Poe's tale and the ones that surround it in The Gift invite us to read "The Purloined Letter" in relation to the social economy of the gift book and against the background of what could be called its generic plot. While the mainstream stories reemphasize commercial strategy based on commodified seduction, I contend that "The Purloined Letter" provides us with a more complex model that both fulfills the reader's expectations and critiques the underlying ideology of "The Gift." I therefore show how Poe "purloins" the gift book's typical gender economy and how the homosocial eroticism of his tale bears on its famous twentieth-century readings.