New Books The American Slave Narrative and the Victorian Novel

(Oxford University Press) In this book, the author argues that the genre of the American slave narrative had a shaping influence on the Victorian novel between the British Abolition Act and the American Emancipation Proclamation. She explains how authors Charlotte Brontë, W. M. Thackeray, Elizabeth Gaskell, Charles Dickens, and Fanny and Robert Louis Stevenson incorporated generic elements of the slave narrative — the emphasis on literacy as a tool of liberation, the teleological journey from slavery to freedom, and the ethics of resistance over submission — into their writings. Lee looks at how the slave narrative became part of the textual network of the English novel and shows how black literary production contributed to English culture. Julia Sun-Joo Lee is a visiting assistant professor at Loyola Marymount University and a Fellow at the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard University.