The Cambridge Companion to the African American Slave Narrative

by Edited by Audrey Fisch

• ISBN13: 9780521615266
• ISBN10: 0521615267
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2007-06-18
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

The slave narrative has become a crucial genre within African American literary studies and an invaluable record of the experience and history of slavery in the United States. This Companion examines the slave narrative's relation to British and American abolitionism, Anglo-American literary traditions such as autobiography and sentimental literature, and the larger African American literary tradition. Special attention is paid to leading exponents of the genre such as Olaudah Equiano, Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs, as well as many other, less well known examples. Further essays explore the rediscovery of the slave narrative and its subsequent critical reception, as well as the uses to which the genre is put by modern authors such as Toni Morrison. With its chronology and guide to further reading, the Companion provides both an easy entry point for students new to the subject and comprehensive coverage and original insights for scholars in the field.

Table of Contents

List of contributors	p. ix
Acknowledgments	p. xii
Chronology	p. xiii
Introduction	p. 1
The Slave Narrative and Transnational Abolitionism
The rise, development, and circulation of the slave narrative	p. 11
Politics and political philosophy in the slave narrative	p. 28
Olaudah Equiano: African British abolitionist and founder of the African American slave narrative	p. 44
The slave narrative and the literature of abolition	p. 61
The Slave Narrative and Anglo-American Literary Traditions
Redeeming bondage: the captivity narrative and the spiritual autobiography in the African American slave narrative tradition	p. 83
The slave narrative and the revolutionary tradition of American autobiography	p. 99
The slave narrative and sentimental literature	p. 115
The Slave Narrative and the African American Literary Tradition
The slave narrative and early Black American literature	p. 137
Telling slavery in "freedom's" time: post-Reconstruction and the Harlem Renaissance	p. 150
Neo-slave narratives	p. 168
The Slave Narrative and the Politics of Knowledge
Harriet Jacobs: a case history of authentication	p. 189
Frederick Douglass's self-fashioning and the making of a Representative American man	p. 201
Beyond Douglass and Jacobs	p. 218
Black womanhood in North American women's slave narratives	p. 232
Guide to further reading	p. 246
Index	p. 259
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