Specters of Democracy

ISBN-13: 9780195337372 / Angielski / Twarda / 2011 / 252 str.

Wilson

Opis

Specters of Democracy examines how figurations of blackness were used to illuminate the fraught relationship between citizenship, equality, and democracy in the antebellum U.S. Through close readings of Frederick Douglass, William Wells Brown, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, and Walt Whitman (on aurality), and Herman Melville, William J. Wilson, and a host of genre painters (on visuality), the book reveals how the difficult tasks of representing African Americans-both enslaved and free-in imaginative expression was part of a larger dilemma concerning representative democracy itself.

Recenzje

...Wilson aims to forge a new understanding of black citizenship, which began to move from shadow to substance in the era before the Civil War. Specialists will appreciate Wilson's ambitious argument...

O autorze

Wilson is Assistant Professor of English at Northwestern University.