Telling Narratives
Secrets in African American Literature
Uncovering powerful and threatening secrets in African American literature
Cloth – $44
978-0-252-03211-0
eBook – $29.95
978-0-252-05590-4
Publication Date
Cloth: 11/26/2007
About the Book
Telling Narratives analyzes key texts from nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century African American literature to demonstrate how secrets and their many tellings have become slavery's legacy. By focusing on the ways secrets are told in texts by Jessie Fauset, Charles W. Chesnutt, Pauline Hopkins, Frederick Douglass, and others, Leslie W. Lewis suggests an alternative model to the feminist dichotomy of "breaking silence" in response to sexual violence. This fascinating study also suggests that masculine bias problematically ignores female experience in order to equate slavery with social death. In calling attention to the sexual behavior of slave masters in African American literature, Lewis highlights its importance to slavery's legacy and offers a new understanding of the origins of self-consciousness within African American experience.About the Author
Leslie W. Lewis is an associate professor of English at the College of Saint Rose, Albany, New York, and coeditor of Women's Experience of Modernity, 1875-1945.Reviews
"Lewis's is the first book-length study of narrative secrets in African American literature. . . . Recommended."--ChoiceBlurbs
"A provocative unveiling of secrets in African American literature from the mid-nineteenth century through the 1920s. Uncovering what was and is at stake in the discourse of secrecy in African American literature and culture, Lewis helps readers see its grounding in 'master-female slave moments.' The analysis of interracial and sexual secrets is enlightening and instructive."--William L. Andrews, editor of The Literature of the American South: A Norton Anthology
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