DOI
https://doi.org/10.25772/QJDC-ZH08
Defense Date
2017
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Master of Arts
Department
English
First Advisor
Les Harrison
Second Advisor
Shermaine Jones
Third Advisor
David Latané
Fourth Advisor
Ryan Smith
Abstract
Through their editorial arrangements of African-American, Euro-American and European poetry, fiction and news, Frederick Douglass’s anti-slavery periodicals (The North Star and Frederick Douglass’ Paper) imagine a cosmopolitan discourse that predates the segregated realities of the antebellum United States. In spite of Southern blockades against the infiltration of Northern texts, Douglass’s material space uniquely capitalized on the limited restrictions of his reprinting culture to relocate the voice of the ‘outraged slave’ onto a global stage. From the poems of Phillis Wheatley and William Cowper to Charles Dickens’s Bleak House and Douglass’s own novella “The Heroic Slave,” this project considers how Douglass’s literary inclusions—and exclusions—complicate our static considerations of the historicized Douglass and exhibit his savvy insertions of black print into an exclusive, transatlantic nineteenth-century print culture.
Rights
© The Author
Is Part Of
VCU University Archives
Is Part Of
VCU Theses and Dissertations
Date of Submission
5-9-2017
Included in
African American Studies Commons, American Literature Commons, American Material Culture Commons, Literature in English, British Isles Commons, Literature in English, North America Commons, Literature in English, North America, Ethnic and Cultural Minority Commons