Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Cheap Editions, Little Books, and Handsome Duodecimos: A Book History Approach to Antebellum Slave Narratives

2015; Oxford University Press; Volume: 40; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1093/melus/mlv032

1946-3170

Michaël Roy,

Literature: history, themes, analysis

In this essay I look at three canonical antebellum slave narratives from a book-historical perspective—the narratives of James Williams (1838), Frederick Douglass (1845), and Solomon Northup (1853)—to show that, despite similarities in terms of content, these works differed greatly in both formal and cultural terms. While Narrative of James Williams was published as a piece of anti-slavery propaganda and wholly embedded in abolitionist discourse, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave was a much more personal literary endeavor, which involved Douglass himself as well as informal abolitionist networks. Released a year after Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin , in the context of the “Uncle Tom mania” of the early 1850s, Northup's Twelve Years a Slave was, to a large extent, a commercial venture that capitalized on the latest literary trend. Each of these three narratives, therefore, occupied a different space in antebellum print culture. By examining how these texts were published and circulated, I show that generalizations about antebellum slave narratives—slave narratives as bestsellers, as directed toward a Northern white audience, as a distinct genre recognizable by all—distort the complex history of this literary tradition. I argue that acknowledging the heterogeneous nature of what we usually perceive as a homogeneous whole gives us a better sense of how these texts might have been variously received and consumed in the decades preceding the Civil War.