The role of the engaging narrator in four nineteenth-century American slave narratives

"The Role of the Engaging Narrator in Four 19th-Century American Slave Narratives" establishes the importance of societal, political, and racial pressures upon the autobiographical narratives of four prominent African-American writers: Frederick Douglass, William Wells Brown, Harriet Wilson, and Harriet Jacobs. This particular study is unique in the discussion of slave narratives for its contention that each author employs the rhetorical device of the "engaging narrator"--a narrative voice that intervenes into the text and addresses the reader or readers directly. This narrative voice is the mouthpiece of the author; it "ruptures" the literary conventions anticipated by the middle-class, white reading audience, and allows the socially conscious autobiographical voice of the fugitive slave to speak plainly and simply about the horrors of slavery and the need to change the social reality of American society.;Chapter one establishes the social, historical, and literary framework for the development of the slave narrative. The first chapter discusses the critical reputation of the slave narrative and contextualizes it as a literary invocation of an autobiographical form.;In chapter two, I discuss the subtle and exploratory use of the engaging narrator by ex-slave and abolitionist speaker, Frederick Douglass. Douglass also invokes the conventions of the picaresque novel and then dismantles them as he demonstrates that the African-American ex-slave is not a wandering, amoral hero, but a serious, hard-working American individual.;William Wells Brown's novel, Clotel, Or the President's Daughter, (1853) is the focus of chapter three. Brown's text cuts across class boundaries in America, and thus, is one of the first truly democratic examples of American fiction published in the United States.;The focus of chapter four is Harriet Wilson's novel Our Nig (1859). Through the rhetorical device of the engaging narrator, Wilson blurs the line between autobiography and fiction, collapsing the discursive fields of self and society, as she stands both inside and outside the society she intends to critique.;Chapter five takes Harriet Jacobs's famous narrative, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written By Herself (1861) as its subject. Jacobs's narrative is the most sophisticated and daring of the four narratives considered in this study because of her advanced thinking about the politics of gender and race. Jacobs articulates that American society of the l9th-century has several layers of morality that are maintained based on the oppression and subjugation of the black woman.;The Afterword reviews the historical, political and social realities of the mid-19th-century as portrayed in the four narratives. It uses the theories of new historicism and the process of novelization to demonstrate that a revision of history from the perspective of the slave narrative will lead to a clearer and more accurate understanding of American society under the influence of slavery.