Conceived as a literary form to aggressively publicize the abolitionist cause in the United States, the African American slave narrative remains a powerful and illuminating demonstration of America's dark history. Yet the genre's impact extended far beyond the borders of the U.S. In a period when few books sold more than five hundred copies, slave narratives sold in the tens of thousands, providing British readers vivid accounts of the violence and privation experienced by American slaves. Eloquent, bracing narratives by Frederick Douglass, William Box Brown, Solomon Northrop, and others enjoyed unprecedented popularity, captivating audiences that included activists, journalists, and some of the era's greatest novelists.
The American Slave Narrative and the Victorian Novel investigates the shaping influence of the American slave narrative on the Victorian novel in the years between the British Abolition Act and the American Emancipation Proclamation. The book argues that Charlotte Brontë, W. M. Thackeray, Elizabeth Gaskell, Charles Dickens, and Fanny and Robert Louis Stevenson integrated into their works generic elements of the slave narrative-from the emphasis on literacy as a tool of liberation, to the teleological journey from slavery to freedom, to the ethics of resistance over submission. It contends that Victorian novelists used these tropes in an attempt to access the slave narrative's paradigm of resistance, illuminate the transnational dimension of slavery, and articulate Britain's role in the global community. Through a deft use of disparate sources, Lee reveals how the slave narrative becomes part of the textual network of the English novel, making visible how black literary, as well as
economic, production contributed to English culture.
Lucidly written, richly researched, and cogently argued, Julia Sun-Joo Lee's insightful monograph makes an invaluable contribution to scholars of American literary history, African American literature, and the Victorian novel, in addition to highlighting the vibrant transatlantic exchange of ideas that illuminated literatures on both sides of the Atlantic during the nineteenth century.
Industry Reviews
"Lee's book is valuable not only for demonstrating how much Victorian novels have in common with American slave narratives, but for beginning to address the questions this kinship raises...This book breaks new ground, and later critics will build upon it to deepen our understanding of the relationship between the slave narrative and the Victorian novel." --Victorian Studies
"The great originality of Julia Sun-Joo Lee's work lies in the way it traces the influence of African American writing within the traditional heart of British Victorian literature, demonstrating how canonical writers such as Thackeray, Dickens, Gaskell, and Charlotte Bronte were responding in different ways to the genre of the slave narrative. With its surprising but illuminating juxtapositions, this is an example of transatlantic critical practice at its
best."-Paul Giles, author of Atlantic Republic
"The slave's narrative, meant solely to help in the abolishing of slavery, has always had its own literary integrity and importance. Here in this brilliant and original book, Julia Lee shows us the profound influence and transformation it had on the imagination of some of our great writers. With much splendid clarity of words and thought, The American Slave Narrative and the Victorian Novel will continue that tradition of influence and
transformation."-Jamaica Kincaid, author of A Small Place
"Julia Sun-Joo Lee makes the case for the influence of American slavery and the slave narrative on the Victorian novel. Her carefully researched, elegantly written, and original studies of texts by Bronte, Thackeray, Gaskell, Dickens, and Stevenson are sure to become staples."-Audrey Fisch, author of American Slaves in Victorian England
"Fresh and surefooted, Julia Sun-Joo Lee's book does what no other book has done before: it presents the American slave narrative as a point of origin for English narratives of dissent, resistance, and freedom. This is a welcome and, as Lee's authoritative work shows, a well-founded change in critical orientation. Lee's pathbreaking book will transform the fields of Victorian, transatlantic, and African American studies."-Henry Louis Gates Jr., author of
The Signifying Monkey
"Offers compelling evidence of the depth of Victorian writers' engagement with the plots, images, and motifs of American slave narratives...The American Slave Narrative and the Victorian Novel offers a rich array of information and ideas that will make it a rewarding read for any student of Victorian literature." --Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies
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