Nat Turner before the bar of judgment : fictional treatments of the Southampton slave insurrection
著者
書誌事項
Nat Turner before the bar of judgment : fictional treatments of the Southampton slave insurrection
(Southern literary studies)
Louisiana State University Press, c1999
大学図書館所蔵 全15件
  青森
  岩手
  宮城
  秋田
  山形
  福島
  茨城
  栃木
  群馬
  埼玉
  千葉
  東京
  神奈川
  新潟
  富山
  石川
  福井
  山梨
  長野
  岐阜
  静岡
  愛知
  三重
  滋賀
  京都
  大阪
  兵庫
  奈良
  和歌山
  鳥取
  島根
  岡山
  広島
  山口
  徳島
  香川
  愛媛
  高知
  福岡
  佐賀
  長崎
  熊本
  大分
  宮崎
  鹿児島
  沖縄
  韓国
  中国
  タイ
  イギリス
  ドイツ
  スイス
  フランス
  ベルギー
  オランダ
  スウェーデン
  ノルウェー
  アメリカ
注記
Includes bibliographical references (p. 281-290) and index
内容説明・目次
内容説明
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, re-tried, 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.
Davis begins by dismantling the historical scaffolding that surrounds her subject. She decodes Virginia governor John Floyd's ""official"" assessment of the revolt, which, she says, exemplifies the dialogism between the earliest texts about the rebellion and the incipient novel tradition. She also considers three classes of documents that triangulate the trial trope: court records, selected newspaper accounts, and Thomas Gray's seminal work, The Confessions of Nat Turner (1831). The remainder of her study treats in expansive detail the six novels: The Old Dominion; or, The Southampton Massacre (1856), by the English historical novelist George Payne Rainsford James; Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp (1856), by Harriet Beecher Stowe; Homoselle (1881), by Mary Spear Tiernan; Their Shadows Before: A Story of the Southampton Insurrection (1899), by Pauline Carrington Rust Bouvé; Ol' Prophet Nat (1967), by Daniel Panger; and, best known, The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967), by William Styron. Discussion of Dessa Rose (1986), Sherley Anne Williams' response to Styron's novel, shapes the conclusion.
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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