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Why We Like Uncle Tom's Cabin Better than Jameson

In the first chapter ('History') of Neil Bartlett's Who Was That Man? (a bio of Oscar Wilde), Bartlett describes three forms of gay narrative, three genres:

1) The personal coming out story.

2) The history of homosexuality.

3) And one which "combines the historical methods of the second with the individual subject of the first. The hero in this case is a single, usually 'great' homosexual. His fame rests in part on being hidden, on being in need of revelation ..."

I have felt very grudging toward usages of 'genre' which expand the word beyond a strictly literary term. Of course humans categorize all aspects of their existence, and there's no need to take terms from one categoried area and apply it to another. That increases the sloppiness of categorization, by using an unneeded metaphor. 

And another thing:

Genre is not the same as structure. Genres usually have a structure, though there is a certain amount of malleability in the structure for the particular works in a given genre: less for a sonnet than a novel, more for a comedy than a tragedy (and at one point does something stop being a novel and become something else which is novel-like? Difficult.) What distinguishes structure from genre? Do particular genres have a particular kind of content? No. What is there to a piece of writing besides structure and content?

Ok, got bogged down last time.

My overall topic is: how does humor function in Uncle Tom's Cabin? I'm not theorizing on the difference between characters in comedies and characters with comedic attributes in serious works. 

One principle of the theory of humor which I am constructing is that a work may be humorous in nature, or a work may be non-humorous ('serious', is too value-laden a term) but with comedic elements. (Likewise, there are tragic works and tragic elements in non-tragic works; adventure stories can have tragic and comedic elements without being either comic or tragic overall).

So, I'm reading "Get Out of Gaol Free, or: How to Read a Comic Plot" by John Bruns (Journal of Narrative Theory, v.35 no.1, Winter 2005, pg. 25-60).

OFMG, Melville basically tells us straight out what he's doing on goddamn page 4-5! Look:

"…meditation and water are wedded forever … Narcisuss, who because he could not grasp the tormenting, mild image he saw in the fountain, plunged into it and was drowned. But that same image, we ourselves see in all rivers and oceans. It is the image of the ungraspable phantom of life; and this is the key to it all."

And of course everyone drowns except Ishmael, whatever that means, though I suppose if I think about it then I'll just drown in Moby Dick myself. Scholarship as suicide, as another alternative to pistol and ball, heh.

Throughout modern history, there has been an abundance of interest regarding the concept of the psychopath and sociopath. Many portrayals of sociopaths seem to be overly romanticized, and fictional characters such as Hannibal Lector or Dexter Morgan (Silence of the Lambs and Dexter respectively) are sources of fascination for an uneducated public. It is difficult when watching such characterizations to discern what is true and what is fantastical about their portrayal, and that is why I began researching psychopaths and sociopaths. While the information I found was educational, it is clear that there is some confusion as to how exactly one can define these mental disorders, even among the scientific community.