The two-ply yarn: Slave narratives and slave owner narratives in the Antebellum South.
Item
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Title
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The two-ply yarn: Slave narratives and slave owner narratives in the Antebellum South.
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Identifier
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AAI9510651
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identifier
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9510651
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Creator
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Cumberland, Sharon.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Joan Richardson
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Date
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1994
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Literature, American | American Studies | Literature, African
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Abstract
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The subject of this study is the contest between two literatures of the Antebellum South: the Slave Owner Narratives, consisting of the fiction, non-fiction, and autobiography concerned with slave holding, and Slave Narratives, written at the instigation of northern abolitionists by fugitive slaves before the Civil War, and including related prose and fiction.;In Chapter One, "Classifying: Slave Owner Narratives as a Discursive Category," I suggest the value of using slave ownership as a criterion for organizing southern literature and juxtaposing it with the African American Slave Narrative. In Chapter Two, "Justifying: Slave Songs and the Ideological Strain," I demonstrate how both genres overlap in their use of the same cultural field, slave singing and "sorrow songs," for arguing opposing points of view. In Chapter Three, "Testifying: The Rhetoric of Persuasion," I discuss the problem of believability for literatures contending at the bar of public opinion, and the strategies used in Slave Owner Narratives to persuade politically uncommitted northerners to support slavery. In Chapter Four, "Appropriating: Pastoral and Anti-Pastoral in Douglass and Jacobs," I suggest that Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs appropriated the pastoral style of the neo-classical South to indict the plantation world in the same terms used by slave owner narrators to idealize it. In Chapter Five, "Cross-Referencing: Plantation Characters as Fields of Contention," I use an existential interpretation of both genres to show how slaves and slave owners projected fantasy images onto each other to shield themselves from an awareness of their own unacceptable behaviors and to attribute desired functions to the opposite number.;Some of the works considered in this dissertation are Mary Boykin Chesnut, A Diary from Dixie; Frederick Douglass, The Heroic Slave and the 1845 Narrative; Joseph Holt Ingraham, The Sunny South; Margaret Johnson Erwin, Like Some Green Laurel; Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl; John Pendleton Kennedy, Swallow Barn; William Gilmore Simms, Woodcraft; and George Tucker, The Valley of the Shenandoah.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
