The Word in Black and White: Reading "Race" in American Literature, 1638-1867

by Dana D. Nelson

Overview

Nelson provides a study of the ways in which Anglo-American authors constructed "race" in their works from the time of the first British colonists through the period of the Civil War. She focuses on some eleven texts, ranging from widely-known to little-considered, that deal with the relations among Native, African, and Anglo-Americans, and places her readings in the historical, social, and material contexts of an evolving U.S. colonialism and internal imperialism. Nelson shows how a novel such as The Last of the Mohicans sought to reify the Anglo historical past and simultaneously suggested strategies that would serve Anglo-Americans against Native Americans as the frontier pushed further west. Concluding her work with a reading of Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl Nelson shows how that text undercuts the racist structures of the pre-Civil War period by positing a revised model of sympathy that authorizes alternative cultural perspectives and requires Anglo-Americans to question their own involvement with racism.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780195065923
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	01/02/1992
Pages:	208
Product dimensions:	6.38(w) x 9.56(h) x 0.89(d)

About the Author

Dana D. Nelson is Associate Professor of English at Louisiana State University. She is the editor of the Oxford edition of Rebecca Rush's Kelroy.

Table of Contents

1.	An Uncommon Need: "Race" in Early American Literature	3
2.	Economies of Morality and Power: Reading "Race" in Two Colonial Texts	22
3.	Romancing the Border: Bird, Cooper, Simms, and the Frontier Novel	38
4.	W/Righting History: Sympathy as Strategy in Hope Leslie and A Romance of the Republic	65
5.	Ethnocentrism Decentered: Colonial Motives in The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym	90
6.	"For the Gaze of the Whites": The Crisis of the Subject in "Benito Cereno"	109
7.	"Read the Characters, Question the Motives": Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl	131
	Notes	147
	Bibliography	169
	Index	185

Editorial Reviews

"Thoughtful, well-researched, and provocative study....Serves admirably as a primer for reading constructions of race in a variety of primary texts across a significant range of genres in early American literary and cultural history."—William and Mary Quarterly

"Timely...An exemplary work of cultural history and literary criticism....A sophisticated authoritative book valuable to specialists and advanced students."—Choice

From the Publisher