Document Type
Dissertation
Date of Degree
2013
Degree Name
PhD (Doctor of Philosophy)
Degree In
English
First Advisor
Brooks Landon
First Committee Member
Horace Porter
Second Committee Member
Miriam Thaggert
Third Committee Member
Harilaos Stecopoulos
Fourth Committee Member
Leslie Schwalm
Abstract
My project argues that during the 19th century resistive violence by the enslaved is impossible to meaningfully acknowledge and simultaneously too compelling to ignore. The problem of representing this violence persists in 20th century literary representations of enslaved people's conscious militancy in the U.S. Black violence is often invisible, composing an un-tell-able or at least untold aspect of history. Because these acts that almost completely resist the kind of social/historical encodations of events that make the unfamiliar, that which is distant in time and experience, familiar, violent black self-possession finds expression in strangeness - what I call the fantastical historic. The fantastical historic as a theory explains how literature contributes, through the vehicle of the non-mimetic, to both obscurantism and clarification to the lived experience of enslavers and the enslaved.
Pages
iv, 203 pages
Bibliography
Includes bibliographical references (pages 197-203).
Copyright
Copyright 2013 Wanda Sybil Raiford