To Tell a Free Story: The First Century of Afro-American Autobiography, 1760-1865 - Softcover

Andrews, William L.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0252060334 ISBN 13: 9780252060335

Publisher: University of Illinois Press, 1988

Synopsis

To Tell A Free Story traces in unprecedented detail the history of black America's most innovative literary tradition -- the autobiography -- from its beginnings to the end of the slavery era.
 

About this title

About the Author:

William L. Andrews, a native Virginian, is professor of English at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. He is the author of The Literary Career of Charles W. Chesnutt, and the editor of Literary Romanticism in America, Critical Essays on W.E. B. DuBois, Sisters of the Spirit: Three Black Women's Autobiographies of the Nineteenth Century, and a new edition of My Bondage and My Freedom (forthcoming from Illinois in 1987).
 

From Library Journal:

Andrews describes and analyzes many autobiographies here, but his primary focus is on "slave narratives" by Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs (a.k.a. Linda Brent), and J. D. Green. He convincingly advances new ideas regarding all three: that Douglass's My Bondage and My Free dom has been misread and vastly underrated for years; that Jacobs's long-scorned Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl is in fact poignant, subtle, and important; and that Green's almost totally neglected Narrative is a "ground-breaking, precedent-defying work." Andrews shows how the authors of such works coped with the preconceptions of their white editors and readers. Though pedantic at times (consider such phrases as "ontological distanciation"), Andrews's analysis is gripping and often touching. Peter Dollard, Alma Coll. Lib., Mich.
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: University of Illinois Press
• Publication date: 1988
• ISBN 10: 0252060334
• ISBN 13: 9780252060335
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 368