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Voices of the Fugitives Runaway Slave Stories and Their Fictions of Self-Creation
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Sterling Lecater Bland, Jr.
ISBN: 0-313-31169-2
ISBN-13: 978-0-313-31169-7
208 pages
Praeger Publishers
Publication: 7/30/2000
List Price: $119.95 (UK Sterling Price: £82.95)
Availability: In Stock
Media Type: Hardcover
Also Available: Paperback
Trim Size: 6 1/8 x 9 1/4
Subjects:
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
About the Author: STERLING LECATER BLAND, JR. is Assistant Professor of English at Rutgers University.
LCC Class: 818
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