Telling Narratives

Secrets in African American Literature

Leslie W. Lewis

• Publisher: University of Illinois Press
• Year: 2024
• Print ISBN: 9780252032110
• eBook ISBN: 9780252055904
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Feminist Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Telling Narratives analyzes key texts from nineteenth- and early twentieth-century African American literature to demonstrate how secrets and their many tellings have become slavery's legacy. By focusing on the ways secrets are told in texts by Jessie Fauset, Charles W. Chesnutt, Pauline Hopkins, Frederick Douglass, and others, Leslie W. Lewis suggests an alternative model to the feminist dichotomy of "breaking silence" in response to sexual violence. This fascinating study also suggests that masculine bias problematically ignores female experience in order to equate slavery with social death. In calling attention to the sexual behavior of slave masters in African American literature, Lewis highlights its importance to slavery's legacy and offers a new understanding of the origins of self-consciousness within African American experience.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Positioning Secrets
• 1. The Master/Female Slave Moment as Slavery’s Legacy
• 2. Father/Son Relations in African American Abolitionist Fiction
• 3. Slave Mothers and Colored Consciousness
• 4. Narrative Fathering and the Epistemology of Secret Knowing
• 5. Queering America’s Family: Jessie Fauset’s Modern Novels
• Afterword: Telling in the Twentieth Century
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index