1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910457640903321

Autore

Chakkalakal Tess

Titolo

Novel bondage [[electronic resource] ] : slavery, marriage, and freedom in nineteenth-century America / / Tess Chakkalakal

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Champaign, : University of Illinois Press, c2011

ISBN

1-283-22389-9

9786613223890

0-252-09338-0

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (159 p.)

Disciplina

813/.3093543

Soggetti

Slavery in literature

Marriage in literature

Slaves - United States - Social conditions

African Americans in literature

Electronic books.

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Nota di contenuto

Introduction: the slave-marriage plot -- Between fiction and experience: William Wells Brown's Clotel -- Dred and the freedom of marriage: Harriet Beecher Stowe's fiction of law -- Free, black, and married: Frank J. Webb's the Garies and their friends -- "A legally unmarried race": Frances Harper's marital mission -- Wedded to race: Charles Chesnutt's stories of the color line -- Conclusion: reading Hannah Crafts in the twenty-first century.

Sommario/riassunto

Filling a long-standing gap in our knowledge about slave-marriage, 'Novel Bondage' unravels the interconnections between marriage, slavery, and freedom through renewed readings of canonical nineteenth-century novels and short stories by black and white authors. Tess Chakkalakal expertly mines antislavery and post-Civil War fiction to extract literary representations of slave-marriage, revealing how these texts and their public responses took aim not only at the horrors of slavery but also at the legal conventions of marriage.