Critical Insights: Frederick Douglass

Description

As a former slave who became a powerful writer, orator, rhetorician, social critic, and abolitionist leader, Frederick Douglass is one of nineteenth-century America s most important figures. This essay collection focuses on Douglass' contributions to American and African American literature. In addition to offering new perspectives of Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, Written by Himself, this volume contains critical essays about What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?, The Heroic Slaves, and Douglass later autobiographies. It also considers Douglass writings alongside the works of his contemporaries and explores his continuing literary legacy in the global twenty-first century. About This Volume Renaissance Man: On Frederick Douglass and American Literature  The Long Reaching Impact: Biography of Frederick Douglass Autobiography as Rhetoric: Reading Douglass with Franklin Frederick Douglass’s Rhetorical Autobiographies Frederick Douglass and the (Im)Possibility of Being: An Afro-Pessimist Reading Bearing Witness to a Peculiar Institution: A Gendered Reading of Frederick Douglass’s Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl Canonization and Its Discontents: Narrative of the Life in the Context of Douglass’s Intellectual Development The Many Roles of Listening in Frederick Douglass’s Narrative of the Life and The Heroic Slave “The health of the eye seems to demand a horizon”: Self-Reliance and Selfishness in Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “Self-Reliance” and Frederick Douglass’s Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass The Anticipatory Print Life of Frederick Douglass’s July Fourth Speech (1852) Racial Geopolitics in Frederick Douglass’s The Heroic Slave “Self-Made Men”: Frederick Douglass’s Reframing of Nineteenth-Century American Personhood Making the American Self and Self-Made Man in The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass and Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography Black Voices for Freedom: Frederick Douglass and José María Samper’s Florencio Conde Frederick Douglass: Legacy and Influences Frederick Douglass in James McBride’s The Good Lord Bird Black Writers Matter: Frederick Douglass in the Literary Present Chronology of Frederick Douglass’s Life Works by Frederick Douglass Bibliography About the Editor Contributors  Index