牛津非裔美国人奴隶叙事手册

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基本信息

John Ernest (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of the African American Slave Narrative, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.

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内容简介

Given the rise of new interdisciplinary and methodological approaches to African American and Black Atlantic studies, The Oxford Handbook of the African American Slave Narrative will offer a fresh, wide-ranging assessment of this major American literary genre. The volume will begin with articles that consider the fundamental concerns of gender, sexuality, community, and the Christian ethos of suffering and redemption that are central to any understanding of slave narratives. The chapters that follow will interrogate the various agendas behind the production of both pre- and post-Emancipation narratives and take up the various interpretive problems they pose. Strategic omissions and veiled gestures were often necessary in these life accounts as they revealed disturbing, too-painful truths, far beyond what white audiences were prepared to hear. While touching upon the familiar canonical autobiographies of Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs, the Handbook will pay more attention to the under-studied narratives of Josiah Henson, Sojourner Truth, William Grimes, Henry Box Brown, and other often-overlooked accounts. In addition to the literary autobiographies of bondage, the volume will anatomize the powerful WPA recordings of interviews with former slaves during the late 1930s. With essays on the genres imaginative afterlife, its final essays will chart the emergence and development of neoslave narratives, most notably in Styrons The Confessions of Nat Turner, Toni Morrisonss Beloved and Octavia Butlers provocative science fiction novel, Kindred. In short, the Handbook will provide a long-overdue assessment of the state of the genre and the vital scholarship that continues to grow around it, work that is offering some of the most provocative analysis emerging out of the literary studies discipline as a whole.

有鉴于 非裔美国人研究与黑色大西洋研究中新兴跨学科取径与方法论的勃兴，《牛津非裔美国人奴隶叙事手册》意在对这一美国文学的重要文类作出全新而广阔的评估。

全书首列诸章， 探讨性别、性、共同体，以及受难与救赎的基督教精神气质等根本议题——凡欲理解奴隶叙事，皆不可绕开于此。

继而各章则 追问解放前后各类叙事在生成过程中所承载的种种意图，并处理由此衍生的诸般阐释难题。

在这些生命自述中，有所省略、有所隐晦，往往势在必行：因为它们所揭示的真相令人不安、过于沉痛，远超白人读者所能承受之限度。

本手册在论及弗雷德里克·道格拉斯与哈丽雅特·雅各布斯等业已经典化的自传之余，更着意于素乏研究的文本，如约西亚·亨森、索杰纳·特鲁思、威廉·格兰姆斯、亨利·"箱子"·布朗等人的叙述，以及其他每每被忽略的记述。

除奴役经历的文学性自传外， 本书亦细致剖解20世纪30年代后期"公共事业振兴署"（WPA）对昔日奴隶所作访谈的珍贵录音。

末尾数篇论文着眼于该文类的想象性来生，勾勒"新奴隶叙事"的兴起与流变，尤以斯泰伦《纳特·特纳的自白》、托妮·莫里森《宠儿》以及奥克塔维娅·巴特勒极富挑衅意味的科幻小说《血缘》为代表。

要之，本手册对该文类的研究现状及其周边持续生长的重要学术成果作出了一次久候始至的检视——而这批成果，正是当今整个文学研究学科中最富启发性的分析之一部分。

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作者简介

John Ernest is Eberly Family Distinguished Professor of American Literature. He is the author of Resistance and Reformation in Nineteenth-Century African-American Literature and Liberation Historiography: African American Writers and the Challenge of History, 1794-1861.