Slavery and the Literary Imagination

Erscheinungsjahr 1989
ISBN: 978-0-8018-3948-1
Verlag: Johns Hopkins University Press

Buch, Englisch, 192 Seiten, Format (B × H): 134 mm x 202 mm, Gewicht: 218 g

Seven noted scholars examine slave narratives and the topic of slavery in American literature, from Frederick Douglass's Narrative (1845)—treated in chapted by Jamkes Olney and William L. Andrews—to Sherley Anne Williams's Dessa Rose (1984). Among the contributors, Arnold Rampersad reads W.E.B. DuBois's classic work The Souls of Black Folk (1903) as a response to Booker T. Washington's Up from Salvery (1901). Hazel V. Carby examines novels of slavery and novels of sharecropping and questions the critical tendency to comflate the two, thereby also conflating the nineteenth century wiith the twentieth, the rural with the urban.

Although works by Afro-American writers are the primary focus, the authors also examine antislavery novels by white women. Hortense J. Spillers gives extensive attention to Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, in juxtaposition with Ishmael Reed's Flight to Canada; Carolyn L. Karcher readers Lydia Maria Child's A Romance of the Republic as an abolitionist vision of America's racial destiny.

In a concluding chapter, Deborah E. McDowell's reading of Dessa Rose reveals how slavery and freedom—dominant themes in nineteenth-century black literature—continue to command the attention of contemporary authors.

Autoren/Hrsg.

McDowell, Deborah E.

Rampersad, Arnold

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Sprachwissenschaft Sprachwissenschaften Semiotik
• Sozialwissenschaften Soziologie | Soziale Arbeit Spezielle Soziologie Soziale Ungleichheit, Armut, Rassismus

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Introduction
Chapter 1. The Founding Fathers—Frederick Douglass and Booker T. Washington
Chapter 2. Changing the Letter: The Yokes, the Jokes of Discourse, or Mrs. Stowe, Mr Reed
Chapter 3. The Representation of Slavery and the Rise of Afro-American Literary Realism, 1865-1920
Chapter 4. Lydia Maria Child's A Romance of the Republic: An Abolitionist Vision of America's Racial Destiny
Chapter 5. Slavery and Literary Imagination/l Du Bois's The Souls of Black Folk
Chapter 6. Ideologies of Black Folk: The Historical Novel of Slavery
Chapter 7. Negotiating between Tenses: Witnessing Slavery after Freedom—Dessa Rose

Über Autor(innen)

Rampersad, Arnold
Arnold Rampersad is professor of English at Columbia Univeristy.

McDowell, Deborah E.
Deborah E. McDowell is associate professor of English at the Univeristy of Virginia.

Deborah E. McDowell is associate professor of English at the Univeristy of Virginia. Arnold Rampersad is professor of English at Columbia Univeristy.