Gender Related Differences in Men and Women's Slave Narrative

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Gender-Related Difference in the Slave Narratives of Harriet Jacobs and Frederick Douglass Winifred Morgan Since the late 1960s, ante-bellum slave narratives have experienced a renaissance as dozens of the thousands still extant have been reprinted and as scholars have published major works on the sources, art, and developmentof the narratives; the people who produced them; and their on-going influence on later work. Drawing upon slave narratives as well among other sources, John Blassingame's The Slave Community (1972), for example, drew attention to the complex social interactions developed in antebellum slave culture. Examining the milieu that spawned the narratives and their development, and providing insights into what the narratives can tell about slavery as well as what they omit, Frances Smith Foster's Witnessing Slavery (1979) gave readers a book-length analysis of the genre. Robert B. Stepto's From Behind the Veil (1979) situated slave narratives at the center of African-American written narrative. John Sekora and Darwin Turner's collection of essays, The Art of the Slave Narrative (1982), focused closer attention on how the narratives achieved their rhetorical effects. In The Slave's Narrative (1985), Charles T. Davis and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. gathered excerpts from some of the best-known narratives and essays about the narratives as history and autobiographical literature. William L. Andrews's To Tell a Free Story (1987) examined the narratives as public autobiographies, at once exploring and demanding freedom. Today, hardly a book is published on American autobiography without a chapter on slave narratives. Not only do scholars writing about African-American literature often refer to the slave 0026-3079/93/3502-073$ 1.50/0 7 o Sv'n her babes, so dear, so young, The*e, ev'n these, were torn âway Î And so treasured in her heart, These,

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