Mastering Slavery: Memory, Family, and Identity in Women's Slave Narratives (Literature and Psychoanalysis, 5) - Hardcover

Fleischner, Jennifer B.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0814726305 ISBN 13: 9780814726303

Publisher: NYU Press, 1996

Synopsis

In Mastering Slavery, Fleischner draws upon a range of disciplines, including psychoanalysis, African-American studies, literary theory, social history, and gender studies, to analyze how the slave narratives--in their engagement with one another and with white women's antislavery fiction--yield a far more amplified and complicated notion of familial dynamics and identity than they have generally been thought to reveal. Her study exposes the impact of the entangled relations among master, mistress, slave adults and slave children on the sense of identity of individual slave narrators. She explores the ways in which our of the social, psychological, biological--and literary--crossings and disruptions slavery engendered, these autobiographers created mixed, dynamic narrative selves.

About this title

From the Back Cover:

In this book, Fleischner draws upon a range of disciplines, including psychoanalysis, African-American studies, literary theory, social history, and gender studies, to analyze how slave narratives in their engagement with one another and with white women's antislavery fiction-yield a far more amplified and complicated notion of familial dynamics and identity than they have generally been thought to reveal.

About the Author:

A former Mellon Faculty Fellow in Afro-American Studies at Harvard University, Jennifer Fleischner is Assistant Professor of English and American Literature at University of Albany, SUNY. She is coeditor, with Susan Ostrov Weisser, of Feminist Nightmares: Women At Odds. Feminism and the Problems of Sisterhood, a feminist anthology about the problem of sisterhood, also published by NYU Press.

About this edition

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Publication date: 1996
• ISBN 10: 0814726305
• ISBN 13: 9780814726303
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 244