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This work examines slave emancipation and opposition to it as a far-reaching, national event with profound social, political, and cultural consequences. The author analyzes multiple views of the African American child to demonstrate how Americans contested and defended slavery and its abolition.
Encompassing a wide range of topics, periods, and genres, this series presents an expansive, forward looking approach American literary and cultural history, emphasizing venturesome scholarship, critical sophistication, and engaging research. Book jacket.
In the decades leading to the Civil War, popular conceptions of African American men shifted dramatically. The savage slave featured in 1830s' novels and stories gave way by the 1850s to the less-threatening humble black martyr. This radical reshaping of black masculinity in American culture occurred at the same time that the reading and writing of popular narratives were emerging as largely feminine enterprises. In a society where women wielded little official power, white female authors exalted white femininity, using narrative forms such as autobiographies, novels, short stories, visual images, and plays, by stressing differences that made white women appear superior to male slaves. This book argues that white women, as creators and consumers of popular culture media, played a pivotal role in the demasculinization of black men during the antebellum period, and consequently had a vital impact on the political landscape of antebellum and Civil War-era America through their powerful influence on popular culture.
Facing America: Iconography and the Civil War investigates and explains the changing face of America during the Civil War. To conjure a face for the nation, author Shirley Samuels also explores the body of the nation imagined both physically and metaphorically, arguing that the Civil War marks a dramatic shift from identifying the American nation as feminine to identifying it as masculine. Expressions of such a change appear in the allegorical configurations of nineteenth-century American novels, poetry, cartoons, and political rhetoric. Because of the visibility of war's assaults on the male body, masculine vulnerability became such a dominant facet of national life that it practically obli...
The papers presented here offer a major challenge to previously conceived ideas about issues like slavery, racism, ethnic relations, nationalism, and cultural identity generating responses, critiques, revisions, counterarguments, and new perspectives. This volume is not only meant to address important matters of the past but also of the present and future as racism, ethnic relations, and cultural identity - with the attendant issues of human rights, freedom, and emancipation - will assume an ever-increasing significance in our globalised but ethically, socially, and culturally divided world. The volume is subdivided into three sections: «Racism and Nationalism» containing papers dealing with issues of racism and nationalism in a broader context, «Slavery: From Past to Present» exploring the concept of slavery in different literary genres and historical periods, «Cultural Identity and Ethnic Relations» dealing with cultural memory, nationalism, and relations between cultural and ethnic groups.
The sentimental antislavery novel Ida May appeared so like its predecessor in the genre, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, that for the month of November 1854, reviewers looked for Harriet Beecher Stowe’s hand in the narrative. Ida May explores the “possibility” of white slavery from the safety of an exciting, romantic narrative: Ida is kidnapped on her fifth birthday from her white middle-class family in Pennsylvania, stained brown, and sold into slavery in the South. Traumatic amnesia brought about by a severe beating keeps her from knowing who she really is, until after five years in slavery her identity is recovered in a dramatic flash of recognition. To the abolitionists of the period, fictional narratives of white enslaved children offered a crucial possibility: to unsettle the legitimacy of a race-based system of enslavement. The historical appendices to this Broadview Edition provide context for the novel’s reception, Pike’s racial politics, and the “problem” of white slavery in nineteenth-century abolitionist writing.
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.
Based on an exhibition at the Houghton Library and was originally published as a special issue of the Harvard Library Bulletin, Volume 17, Numbers 3-4.
Today’s critical establishment assumes that sentimentalism is an eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literary mode that all but disappeared by the twentieth century. In this book, Jennifer Williamson argues that sentimentalism is alive and well in the modern era. By examining working-class literature that adopts the rhetoric of “feeling right” in order to promote a proletarian or humanist ideology as well as neo-slave narratives that wrestle with the legacy of slavery and cultural definitions of African American families, she explores the ways contemporary authors engage with familiar sentimental clichés and ideals. Williamson covers new ground by examining authors who are not generall...