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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: GM1169

ISBN: 0-313-31169-2

ISBN-13: 978-0-313-31169-7

DOI:

208 pages, photos

Greenwood Press

Publication: 7/30/2000

List Price: $119.95 (UK Sterling Price: £70.00)

Availability: In Stock

Media Type: Hardcover

Also Available: Paperback

Trim Size: 6 1/8 x 9 1/4

Subjects:

Series Title: Contributions in Afro-American and African Studies

Series Number: 199

Reviews:

Recommended
—Choice March 2001
[P]rovides a comprehensive examination of the personal narratives of a variety of people of African descent.
—American Literature September 2004
...has special rleavance for historians...Thoroughly researched, clearly considered, and illustrated with state maps and pictures of frowning white politicians, this work is monumentally solid.
—Civil War History September 2002
...offers new readings of narratives that are central to the U.S. literary and cultural tradition.
—The Journal of Southern History May 2002
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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