Slavery and the Literary Imagination

Download or read book Slavery and the Literary Imagination written by Deborah E. McDowell and published by Baltimore : Johns Hopkins University Press. This book was released on 1989 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Seven noted scholars examine slave narratives and the topic of slavery in American literature, from Frederick Douglass's Narrative (1845)-- treated in chapters by James Olney and William L. Andrews-- to Sheley Anne William's "Dessa Rose" (1984). Among the contributors, Arnold Rampersad reads W.E.B. DuBois's classic work "The Souls of Black Folk" (1903) as a response to Booker T. Washington's "Up from Slavery" (1901). Hazel V. Carby examines novels of slavery and novels of sharecropping and questions the critical tendency to conflate the two, thereby also conflating the nineteenth century with the twentieth, the rural with the urban.