Toni Morrison chose to revisit the neo-slave narrative genre twenty-five years after the publication of Beloved with A Mercy in 2008. With these two texts, Morrison offers her readers one story that shows the descent into slavery and one that shows progression towards freedom. The purpose of this thesis is to place Morrison’s two neo-slave narratives, Beloved and A Mercy, next to one another in order to better understand the journey to freedom through self-love. This work examines the concept of self-love and the necessary components—maternal nurturance, ancestral connection, and communal interaction—that must come together to help Morrison’s characters learn to love and see themselves as their “own best thing.” The repercussions that self-love’s absence has for both individual characters and their larger communities is also discussed and illustrated by the struggles of Florens in A Mercy and Sethe in Beloved.

in English The aim of this MA thesis is to bring new perspectives on the genre of the African-American slave narrative. Therefore, its wider historical, socio-political and gender contexts are considered and the circumstances surrounding its development and current criticism are briefly outlined. The point of departure is a discussion of definitions that vary among the scholars who select different criteria for the subject of definition. The existing diversity of the texts and voices is discussed in connection to Moses Grandy's Narrative of the Life of Moses Grandy, Late a Slave in the United States of America. Grandy's narrative, an account of the maritime slave life, is analyzed. Its traditional, uniform narrative structures are juxtaposed with passages where some aspects of his masculine identity, problematized by the institution of slavery, can be traced. Ultimately, the thesis attempts to show that while the conventionalized framework pre-defining the narrative outline and themes is delineated by James Olney, any generally recognized definition of the genre does not exist. As a result of that conclusion, the genre is defined in the scope of this thesis. After the major characteristics of the genre are discussed and the definition of the African- American slave narrative is put forward, more...

L’étude comparative de Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (Harriet Jacobs), Our Nig ; Sketches from the Life of a Free Black (Harriet Wilson) et The Bondwoman’s Narrative (Hannah Crafts) s’attache à ouvrir de nouvelles perspectives sur la singularité du sujet féminin noir dans les anfractuosités de l’écriture autobiographique du récit d’esclave. Si ces femmes auteurs se constituent en témoins privilégiés de la condition féminine noire de l’Amérique « antebellum », elles n’engagent pas moins leur plume dans l’activisme. L’enjeu de cette thèse est de revenir sur les liens entre écriture et féminin en prenant comme point de départ l’œuvre elle-même, fût-elle autobiographie ou fiction. La saisie de soi et du monde et la quête identitaire sont des thèmes fondamentaux de la tradition romanesque africaine américaine où des voix marquantes se succèdent. L’affranchissement du genre autobiographique s’affirme comme instance de survie où la mise en perspective de la fiction permet de révéler la vérité du sujet. Ainsi, la question du genre constitue la trame de ce panorama où sont examinés la nature du discours du sujet noir, l’écriture du corps féminin, et le théâtre « ima-gyn-aire » d’un sujet en crise. En véritable héritière de Dickens et Byron, Hannah Crafts s’attache à créer des correspondances entre les genres, tandis que Harriet Wilson adresse une lettre ouverte à Emerson et Harriet Jacobs subvertit le roman sentimental. Ces trois femmes situent, contre toute attente, l’esthétique du récit d’esclave au carrefour de la littérature autobiographique, sentimentale, gothique et picaresque. Nous verrons, à travers ce travail, que ce n’est pas tant l’anatomie qui distingue le sujet mais plutôt la façon qu’a le sujet de se ranger d’un côté ou de l’autre du genre ; le sujet féminin peut désormais évoluer dans un nouvel espace le libérant de l’emprise du masculin. Cette thèse est également l’occasion d’une réflexion sur la dialectique de l’historicité et la littérarité où l’engagement politique de l’auteur du récit d’esclave, qui est appelé à s’imposer comme littérature, invite à porter un nouveau regard sur la production littéraire féminine avant-gardiste, et ainsi donner un nouvel élan à la littérature africaine américaine. / The comparative study of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (Harriet Jacobs), Our Nig ; Sketches from the Life of a Free Black (Harriet Wilson), and The Bondwoman’s Narrative (Hannah Crafts) aims at opening up new perspectives on the specificity of the female subject, through the slave narrative’s autobiographical writing. If these women writers stand as privileged witnesses of the female condition in Antebellum America, they do not remain passive nonetheless. The aim of this dissertation is to approach the links between « writing » and « feminine », by taking into account the text itself, be it autobiographical or fictionalized. Significantly enough, self-consciousness, identity and the construction of a self through writing are definitely major components of the African American literary tradition in which outstanding voices are singled out. The slave narrative tends to drift away from autobiography in order to afford its survival and conforms to the conventions that proved successful, thus revealing the truth of the subject. In this perspective, gender is the key issue of this study which brings an exclusive insight on black women’s writing. Discursive difference, writing the female body, and a staged conflicted subject are the core themes of this work. As a follower of Dickens and Byron, Hannah Crafts creates a unique blend of genres, while Harriet Wilson’s modus operandi is to rewrite Emerson’s reflections on society, and Harriet Jacobs offers a subversion of the sentimental novel. By all means, these female slave narratives’ « tour de force » lies in the aesthetics and poetics of the genre located at the crossroads of autobiography, sentimental fiction, the gothic and the picaresque. The subject determines its own sexuation, which enables the female subject to break free from the male subject. This dissertation also offers the opportunity to raise the question of history and literature. The slave narrative falls within the frame of literature as the writer’s political stance is an invitation to reconsider avant-garde women’s literary production within the African American literary canon.

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / Research on Harriet Jacobs' slave narrative, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl exploded after 1981, when Professor Jean Fagin Yellin discovered textual evidence for refuting then-current claims that Lydia Maria Child was the author of this engrossing story. Child was indeed the book's editor, but Yellin discovered letters from Jacobs among the papers of abolitionist Amy Post that proved that the ex-slave was the author of her own narrative. Though the research this discovery engendered has been quite extensive, especially regarding the narrative's close adherence to the conventions of a sentimental novel, very few scholars have attempted to deal with a feature relatively unique to Jacobs" narrative: the use of African American English (AAE) in representing the speech of a number of her characters. Nor has any scholar exclusively focused on the authenticity of her representation of AAE. This paper, a first step in such an effort, demonstrates that Jacobs' use conforms to features found by linguists in their studies of contemporary AAE and Early Black English (EBE).

This dissertation uses a functional systemic approach to language to examine the construction of the respective first-person narrators of nine of the most popular, commercially successful and therefore influential African American slave narratives published between 1837 and 1862 (Roper, Grandy, Douglass, Brown, Bibb, Northup, Ball, Jacobs, Picquet). This corpus of more than 410,000 words was scanned for various linguistic features such as transitivity of verbs, nominalizations, and several syntactic features. The texts chosen differ as to their methods of production. Some of them were written by the first person narrators themselves, while others were either extensively edited, dictated to an amanuensis, or in some other way controlled. The dialectics of creation and representation through language results in the leading question in this study: how do the first-person slave narrators identify and create a personality for themselves through their texts? This dissertation thus focuses on the linguistic means by which the first-person slave narrator creates what is defined as a “discoursal self”, which helped the narrators to achieve one of their most important goals, namely, to be accepted as reliable. The dissertation consists of six chapters. Chapter 1 introduces a sociohistorical account of slavery, resistance against slavery, abolition, and the development of the slave narrative. The chapter shows that the African American slave narrative was not a completely new and original genre but an amalgamation of a variety of preexisting white and black literary forms. The second chapter is more theoretical and deals with discourse, power, and ideology in the slave narrative. Chapter 3 approaches the language of the slave narrative. The small corpus of scholarly texts that tackle language and style in this genre is reviewed. As an alternative to these approaches, critical discourse analysis (CDA) according to Norman Fairclough is suggested. It eliminates the a priori categorization of specific linguistic features as stylistically significant, because it is based on a functional view of language that perceives linguistic expression as choice on various levels. Every choice is considered meaningful and, according to its presence, absence, or clustering in a given co-text, potentially stylistic. Michael Halliday’s systemic functional grammar is introduced as the basis for the ensuing text analysis. Chapter 4 introduces the first quantitative observations about the density and distribution of the first-person singular pronoun in the narratives. This characteristic is then placed in relation to syntactic condensation in the forms of ellipsis, finiteness and nominalization, all of which are reviewed quantitatively. Finally, this chapter introduces the system of transitivity according to Halliday, Matthiessen, and others. It explains the distinction between the individual process types and provides a quantitative overview of the individual transitivity profiles within each narrative. Chapter 5 represents the main part of this dissertation. Each of the nine narratives is analyzed individually as to the presence of the I-pronoun in the text and the use and distribution of process types. In this way patterns of foregrounded or favored usages against absences of others emerge and contribute to the discoursal selves that the individual narrators present/construct of themselves. These preferred usages in general as well as in their local distributions are examined in detail. The quantitative observations supply the basis for further qualitative analyses derived from a large number of examples from the texts. Thus it is possible to show that each of the narratives is linguistically unique, which results in an individual construction of the respective I-narrator. The use of pronouns, process types and syntactic reconfigurations reveals how control over the activities as well as over the text is constructed, which can be directly related to issues of power. The Summary provides a synopsis of the previous quantitative and qualitative analyses and associates the quantitative results with characteristics of written and oral texts in general. Finally, it thus becomes possible to rank the nine narratives on a cline between predominantly oral and chiefly written characteristics.

This literary/historical novel details the life of African-American Deputy US Marshal Bass Reeves between the years 1838-1862 and 1883-1884. One plotline depicts Reeves’s youth as a slave, including his service as a body servant to a Confederate cavalry officer during the Civil War. Another plotline depicts him years later, after Emancipation, at the height of his deputy career, when he has become the most feared, most successful lawman in Indian Territory, the largest federal jurisdiction in American history and the most dangerous part of the Old West. A preface explores the uniqueness of this project’s historical relevance and literary positioning as a neo-slave narrative, and addresses a few liberties that I take with the historical record.