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Voices of the Fugitives Runaway Slave Stories and Their Fictions of Self-Creation
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Sterling Lecater Bland
Book Code: B6707
ISBN: 0-275-96707-7
ISBN-13: 978-0-275-96707-9
208 pages, photos
Praeger Paperback
Publication: 7/30/2000
List Price: $34.95 (UK Sterling Price: £19.95)
Availability: Print on demand
Media Type: Paperback
Also Available: Hardcover
Trim Size: 6 1/8 x 9 1/4
Subjects: Reviews:
  • This book can be profitably used in undergraduate classrooms or as an ancillary text.
    —Biography     Summer 2001
Description: African American fugitive slave narratives are receiving growing amounts of attention for their literary and historical value. This book examines the techniques the slave narrative writers used to authorize and rhetorically create themselves in their writings. By examining such issues as voice and identity formation, the volume demonstrates how identity may be seen as a cultural fabrication. Former slave narrators used a series of masking and doubling techniques to address their experiences as African Americans. This book crosses the boundaries between literary criticism and historical study by examining the tensions between generic conventions and the impulses that created and reinforced them. The introduction and opening chapter offer clear and accessible discussions of the social, political, cultural, and literary conditions influencing the slave narrative genre. Subsequent chapters are built on this theoretical framework and present close analytical readings of The Confessions of Nat Turner, Frederick Douglass's Narrative and My Bondage and My Freedom, Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, and Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom, by William and Ellen Craft. The volume probingly traces the relationship between rhetorical self-creation and social ideology to show how that relationship was mediated within the fugitive slave narrative genre.
Table of Contents:
  • Preface
  • Reading in the Breach
  • The Call: The Literary and Cultural Landscape
  • Let the World Dream Otherwise: The Literary Masks of Fugitive Slave Stories
  • Dismantling the Master's House: The Cultural Context
  • ... and the Response: Speaking for Themselves
  • "Behold a Man Transformed": Sacred Language and the Secular Self in Frederick Douglass's Narrative
  • Authority, Power, and Determination of the Will: The Dilemma of Rhetorical Ownership in Frederick Douglass's My Bondage and My Freedom and Harriet Jacob's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
  • Ambiguity, Passing, and the Politics of Color: The Reconstruction of Race in William and Ellen Craft's Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom
  • Epilogue: Of Being and Nothingness: Caliban's Reprise
  • References
  • Index
LC Card Number: 99-055223
LCC Class: PS366
Dewey Class: 818
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