Description
Book SynopsisOffers the first book-length study of the slave narrative as a material artifact. Drawing on a wide range of sources, Michael Roy reconstructs the publication histories of a number of famous and lesser-known narratives, placing them against the changing backdrop of antebellum print culture.
Table of Contents
- Prologue — Runaway Bestsellers?
- Chapter 1 — “The general diffusion of abolition light”: The Institutional Origins of the Antebellum Slave Narrative
- Raindrops, Autumn Leaves, and Snowflakes: Publishing and Circulating Antislavery Literature in the 1830s
- The Narrative of James Williams as Antislavery Propaganda
- Faithful Portrait, Lawful Weapon: Charles Ball’s Slavery in the United States
- Paradoxical Presences: The Narratives of Olaudah Equiano and Chloe Spear
- Chapter 2 — “My Narrative is just published”: Agency, Itinerancy, and the Slave Narrative
- Marginality, Itinerancy, and Reform in Antebellum America
- The Transatlantic Journeys of the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave
- Reprinting and Recycling the Narrative of William W. Brown, a Fugitive Slave
- Other Narratives, Other Trajectories: Henry Bibb, Leonard Black, Sojourner Truth
- Chapter 3 — “Quite a sensation”: Slave Narratives in the Age of Uncle Tom
- “The servile publishers of that day”: Antislavery and the Book Trade
- The Business of Twelve Years a Slave
- Old Friends, New Names: Frederick Douglass and Charles Ball Redux
- Incidents in the Life of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
- Epilogue — The Slave Narrative Unbound
