Impossible Witnesses: Truth, Abolitionism, and Slave by Dwight McBride

By Dwight McBride

Even the main cursory evaluation of black literary creation through the 19th century exhibits that its fundamental issues have been the problems of slavery, racial subjugation, abolitionist politics and liberation. How did the writers of those narratives "bear witness" to the reports they describe? At a time whilst a hegemonic discourse on those topics already existed, what did it suggest to "tell the reality" approximately slavery?

Impossible Witnesses explores those questions via a research of fiction, poetry, essays, and slave narratives from the abolitionist period. Linking the racialized discourses of slavery and Romanticism, it boldly demands a reconfiguration of U.S. and British Romanticism that areas slavery at its center.

Impossible Witnesses addresses the various significant literary figures and representations of slavery in gentle of discourses on usual rights and legislation, bargains an account of Foucauldian discourse research because it applies to the matter of "bearing witness," and analyzes particular narratives equivalent to "Narrative of the lifetime of Frederick Douglass," and "The attention-grabbing Narrative of the lifetime of Olaudah Equiano."

A paintings of significant intensity and originality, Impossible Witnesses renders conventional interpretations of Romanticism very unlikely and areas Dwight A. McBride on the leading edge of reviews in race and literature.

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