Further Details

Title: Fugitive Texts
Condition: New
Subtitle: Slave Narratives in Antebellum Print Culture
EAN: 9780299338442
ISBN: 9780299338442
Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press
Format: Paperback
Release Date: 31/03/2024
Description: Antebellum slave narratives have taken pride of place in the American literary canon. Once ignored, disparaged, or simply forgotten, the autobiographical narratives of Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, and other formerly enslaved men and women are now widely read and studied. One key aspect of the genre, however, has been left unexamined: its materiality. What did original editions of slave narratives look like? How were these books circulated? Who read them?

In Fugitive Texts, MichaËl Roy offers the first book-length study of the slave narrative as a material artifact. Drawing on a wide range of sources, he reconstructs the publication histories of a number of famous and lesser-known narratives, placing them against the changing backdrop of antebellum print culture. Slave narratives, he shows, were produced through a variety of print networks. Remarkably few were published under the full control of white-led antislavery societies; most were self-published and distributed by the authors, while some were issued by commercial publishers who hoped to capitalize on the success of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The material lives of these texts, Roy argues, did not end within the pages. Antebellum slave narratives were “fugitive texts” apt to be embodied in various written, oral, and visual forms.

Published to rave reviews in French, Fugitive Texts illuminates the heterogeneous nature of a genre often described in monolithic terms and ultimately paves the way for a redefinition of the literary form we have come to recognize as “the slave narrative.”
Language: English
Country/Region of Manufacture: US
Item Height: 229mm
Item Length: 152mm
Item Width: 18mm
Author: Michaël Roy
Translator: Susan Pickford
Contributor: Susan Pickford (Translated by)
Genre: Literary Criticism
Topic: History
Item Weight: 272g
Release Year: 2024

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