Slavery and the Literary Imagination / Edition 1

by Deborah E. McDowell, Arnold Rampersad

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780801839481
Publisher:	Johns Hopkins University Press
Publication date:	08/01/1989
Series:	Selected Papers from the English Institute , #13
Edition description:	REPRINT
Pages:	192
Product dimensions:	5.38(w) x 8.00(h) x (d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

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

Arnold Rampersad is professor of English at Columbia Univeristy.

Table of Contents

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

Editorial Reviews

This volume of essays represents the widest spectrum of criticism to date on the intersection of American slavery and literary artistry.
—Joyce H. Scott, American Literature

From the Publisher

This volume of essays represents the widest spectrum of criticism to date on the intersection of American slavery and literary artistry.

American Literature - Joyce H. Scott