Nat Turner before the bar of judgment
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About This Book
An icon in African American history, Nat Turner has generated almost every kind of cultural product, including the historical, imaginative, scholarly, folk, polemical, and reflective. In Nat Turner Before the Bar of Judgment, Mary Kemp Davis offers an original, in-depth analysis of six novels in which Turner figures prominently. This Virginia rebel slave, she argues, has been re-arraigned, retried, and re-sentenced repeatedly during the last century and a half as writers have grappled with the social and moral issues raised by his (in)famous 1831 revolt. Though usually lacking a literal trial, the novels Davis examines all have the theme of judgment at their center, and she ingeniously unravels the "verdict" each author extracts from his or her plot. According to Davis, all of the novelists derive their fundamental understanding about Turner from Gray's overdetermined text, but they recreate it in their own image. In this fictional tradition that begins with a nineteenth-century romance and ends with postmodern revisions of the form, Davis shows the Turner persona to be multivalent and inherently unstable, each novelist laboring mightily and futilely to arrest it within the confines of art.
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Sign InAfrican Americans in literatureAmerican Historical fictionAmerican fictionHistorical fiction, AmericanHistoriographyHistoryHistory and criticismIn literatureLiterature and historyLiterature and the insurrectionSlave insurrectionsSlavery in literature
The Swinging Light
Book Details
First Published
1999
Pages
298 pages
Rating
0.0 / 5
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Editions
1
Publisher
Louisiana State University Press
Language
ENG
Status
Published
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