GERTRUDE AND CLAUDIUS (2000), Updike's only novel set entirely in Europe, is dedicated to his second wife, Martha, with a passage in Occitan: “De dezir mos cors no fina / Vas selha ren qu'ieu pus am” (“The desire of my heart is endless and only devoted to her, beloved among all others” [Goldin 1973, 102]). In this poem, the troubadour poet Jaufre Rudel (ca. 1150–1200) addresses his lady as his “Amors de terra londana,” his love from a distant land. Rudel offered the most extreme example of the courtly love ideal of “amor de lonh,” a love that depends upon distance, upon not possessing the beloved. According to popular legend, he had fallen in love with the countess of Tripoli purely from reports of her virtues, never having laid eyes on her. He set off for Tripoli, only to become ill en route, and he died in the countess's arms on arrival (Goldin 1973, 100). Within the frame of Updike's novel, only Feng (later Claudius), the adulterous lover of Hamlet's mother and then her second husband, quotes from the troubadours. In the classic exposition of courtly love, love cannot exist in marriage. It depends on obstacles, whether distance, a husband, or—as in Updike's modern updating of the story of Tristan and Isolde in his 1994 novel Brazil—on the barriers of race and class. Feng deliberately absents himself from the Danish court for some thirty years, unable to bear the sight of his beloved's marriage to his brother Horwendil. But he remains devoted to his entirely virtuous lady, Gerutha (Gertrude), until she finally succumbs to his advances at the age of forty-eight.

Critics of Updike have related his interest in courtly love to Denis de Rougemont's influential thesis in Love in the Western World (1963) and its sequel Love Declared (1983). Updike reviewed the latter title and returned to its ideas in several reprises (Begley 2014; Corbellari 1999; Duffy 2016; Grimbert 2004; Schiff 1998). De Rougemont emphasizes the way in which the love relations of men and women depended on a particular historical moment, so that their affective life was conditioned by social circumstances.

“So you're the little woman who wrote the book that made this great war!” Lincoln's greeting to Harriet Beecher Stowe at their meeting on 2 December 1862 has become a commonplace of literary scholarship. The reference is to the colossal impact of Uncle Tom's Cabin – a global best seller and the first American novel to sell more than a million copies – and is supported by a number of indices: frenzied Southern attempts to counter its portrayal of slavery in a plethora of “Anti-Tom” novels; children's versions; dramatic adaptations leading to the growth of “Tom troupes” who performed nothing else; and the abundance of what we would today call “tie-ins”: Topsy dolls, board games, Staffordshire figurines, wallpaper, sheet music, and even socks. In the run-up to the Civil War it was possible to read Uncle Tom's Cabin yourself, read it in abridged form to your children, see it on stage, weep over it into an Uncle Tom handkerchief, and recover over supper on an Uncle Tom plate. But did it cause the war? Daniel R. Vollaro has demonstrated that Lincoln's greeting is entirely apocryphal. The story persists partly because it reflects well on Lincoln and Stowe as kindred abolitionists, despite the initially moderate antislavery stance of both, in an intellectual climate where we are eager “to make literature a lever of social or political change”.

Was Uncle Tom's Cabin inflammatory? Or did it set out to promote union and moderation? Arguments have been made on both sides. Vollaro finds the influence of the novel in sparking the war difficult to prove. Most abolition leaders said comparatively little about it, especially the Garrisonians, and there were negative Northern reviews, although the invective from the South was unrestrained. (Stowe received death threats and was sent a severed slave ear in the post.) Mob violence against abolitionism was commonplace in the North, and many Americans remained ambivalent about slavery right up to the outbreak of war. Vollaro is persuasive but unfortunately confines his arguments to the novel per se, something of a straw target.