Slavery, Surveillance, and Genre in Antebellum United States Literatur

This book argues for the existence of deep, often unexamined, interconnections between genre and race by tracing how surveillance migrates from the literature of slavery to crime, gothic, and detective fiction, not only through the traditional concept of surveillance (top-down), but also the tactics of sousveillance (watching from below).

List of contents

• Introduction


• 1: Fugitive Slave Narratives as a Literature of Sousveillance


• 2: Inconspicuous and Conspicuous Detection in Ball and Poe


• 3: White Oversight in The Confessions of Nat Turner, Benito Cereno, and The Heroic Slave


• 4: Speculation Fiction: Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl and The Bondwoman's Narrative


• Coda


• Acknowledgements


• Bibliography

About the author

Kelly Ross is Associate Professor of English at Rider University where she teaches courses in American literature, African American literature, and crime fiction and film. Her essays have appeared in PMLA, The Cambridge Companion to Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Politics, The Oxford Handbook of Edgar Allan Poe, Nineteenth-Century American Literature in Transition, and Leviathan.

Summary

This book argues for the existence of deep, often unexamined, interconnections between genre and race by tracing how surveillance migrates from the literature of slavery to crime, gothic, and detective fiction, not only through the traditional concept of surveillance (top-down), but also the tactics of sousveillance (watching from below).

Additional text

Ross's book presents an intriguing narrative of the role of surveillance and the negotiation of it as a way of claiming power in highly racialized antebellum America.

Product details

• Authors: Kelly Ross, Kelly (Associate Professor of English Ross, Ross Kelly
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 30.09.2022
• EAN: 9780192856272
• ISBN: 978-0-19-285627-2
• No. of pages: 200
• Series: Oxford Studies in American Literary History; Oxford Studies in American Lit
• Subjects: Fiction > Narrative literature; Humanities, art, music > Linguistics and literary studies > General and comparative literary studies; FICTION / Mystery & Detective / General, Crime & mystery, LITERARY CRITICISM / Modern / 19th Century, Literary studies: c 1800 to c 1900, Literary studies: general, Crime and mystery fiction