Haunted Property: Slavery and the Gothic - Couverture rigide

Ford, Sarah Gilbreath

Couverture rigide

ISBN 10 : 1496829697 ISBN 13 : 9781496829696

Editeur : University Press of Mississippi, 2020

Synopsis

Winner of a 2021 South Central Modern Language Association Book Prize

At the heart of America's slave system was the legal definition of people as property. While property ownership is a cornerstone of the American dream, the status of enslaved people supplies a contrasting American nightmare. Sarah Gilbreath Ford considers how writers in works from nineteenth-century slave narratives to twenty-first-century poetry employ gothic tools, such as ghosts and haunted houses, to portray the horrors of this nightmare. Haunted Property: Slavery and the Gothic thus reimagines the southern gothic, which has too often been simply equated with the macabre or grotesque and then dismissed as regional.

Although literary critics have argued that the American gothic is driven by the nation's history of racial injustice, what is missing in this critical conversation is the key role of property. Ford argues that out of all of slavery's perils, the definition of people as property is the central impetus for haunting because it allows the perpetration of all other terrors. Property becomes the engine for the white accumulation of wealth and power fueled by the destruction of black personhood.

Specters often linger, however, to claim title, and Ford argues that haunting can be a bid for property ownership. Through examining works by Harriet Jacobs, Hannah Crafts, Mark Twain, Herman Melville, Sherley Anne Williams, William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Toni Morrison, Octavia Butler, and Natasha Trethewey, Ford reveals how writers can use the gothic to combat legal possession with spectral possession.

A propos du livre

À propos de l'auteur

Sarah Gilbreath Ford is professor of American literature at Baylor University and coeditor of the Eudora Welty Review. She is author of Haunted Property: Slavery and the Gothic, published by University Press of Mississippi, and Tracing Southern Storytelling in Black and White. In 2017 she received the Phoenix Award from the Eudora Welty Society, and in 2019 she was named a Baylor Centennial Professor.

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: University Press of Mississippi
• Date d'édition: 2020
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 1496829697
• ISBN 13: 9781496829696
• Reliure: Relié
• Nombre de pages: 248
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
• Personne responsable: gpsr@libri.de; gpsr@libri.de; ; Europaallee 1; Bad Hersfeld; 36244; Allemagne