THE NOVEL OF SLAVERY

In this course, we’ll be studying a subgenre of U.S. literature known as “the novel of slavery,” and we’ll be reading fictions by literary artists who attempted, in their various and distinctive ways, to come to terms with the atrocity of human bondage. In the first half of the course, we’ll read authors who wrote in the period before the legal abolition of slavery in the U.S., and whose works made direct contributions to the abolitionist cause. In the second half of the course, we’ll read authors who wrote in the years after the Civil Rights Movement, and whose works treated slavery as a historical phenomenon. But regardless of whether we’re discussing literature from the nineteenth century or the twentieth in our meetings, we’ll always be studying novels that condemn slavery as a legal, moral, and social institution; and that explore the wounds that slavery left upon individual and collective psyches; and that ask whether and how slavery’s tremendous wrongs could ever be redressed.