Telling Narratives

by Lewis, Leslie W.

• ISBN13: 9780252032110
• ISBN10: 025203211X
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2007-11-26
• Publisher: Univ of Illinois Pr

Summary

Telling Narrativesanalyzes key texts from nineteenth- and early twentieth-century African American literature to demonstrate how secrets and their many tellings have become slavery's legacy. By focusing on the ways secrets are told in texts by Jessie Fauset, Charles W. Chesnutt, Pauline Hopkins, Frederick Douglass, and others, Leslie W. Lewis suggests an alternative model to the feminist dichotomy of "breaking silence" in response to sexual violence. This fascinating study also suggests that masculine bias problematically ignores female experience in order to equate slavery with social death. In calling attention to the sexual behavior of slave masters in African American literature, Lewis highlights its importance to slavery's legacy and offers a new understanding of the origins of self-consciousness within African American experience.

Author Biography

Leslie W. Lewis is an associate professor of English at the College of Saint Rose, Albany, New York, and coeditor of Women’s Experience of Modernity, 1875-1945.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	p. vii
Introduction: Positioning Secrets	p. 1
The Master/Female Slave Moment as Slavery's Legacy	p. 7
Father/Son Relations in African American Abolitionist Fiction	p. 33
Slave Mothers and Colored Consciousness	p. 67
Narrative Fathering and the Epistemology of Secret Knowing	p. 102
Queering America's Family: Jessie Fauset's Modern Novels	p. 133
Afterword: Telling in the Twentieth Century	p. 167
Notes	p. 175
Works Cited	p. 199
Index	p. 213
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