Browsing by Subject "The Heroic Slave"

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    Autographs for Freedom and Reaching a New Abolitionist Audience
    (University of Chicago Press, 2017-01-01) McKivigan, John R.; Pattillo, Rebecca A.; History, School of Liberal Arts
    Scholars correctly appreciate Frederick Douglass’s novella The Heroic Slave (1853) as an important early work of African American literature and as a significant indicator of its author’s endorsement of violent tactics to end slavery in the United States.1 This essay will literally step back farther from the text of Douglass’s only fictional work, and examine The Heroic Slave as a component of a larger project—the gift book Autographs for Freedom—edited by Douglass and his closest ally in the early 1850s, British abolitionist Julia Griffiths. The thirty-nine pieces of short fiction, poetry, essays, and correspondence in the 263-page anthology were envisioned as tools to construct a wider and politically more potent antislavery alliance than any in which the two abolitionists had previously participated. In the diverse composition of its collection of authors and antislavery themes, Autographs for Freedom was both a cultural and political tool designed by Douglass and Griffiths to help assemble a more powerful antislavery coalition from the volume’s reading audience.
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    Frederick Douglass’s Foray into Fiction: Considering the Context of Recent Work on The Heroic Slave
    (University of Chicago Press, 2017-01-01) McKivigan, John R.; Schultz, Jane E.; History, School of Liberal Arts
    In February 2015, the Frederick Douglass Papers, a documentary editing project at work since 1973 to collect, edit, and disseminate the various works of Frederick Douglass, the most influential African American of the 19th century, published the first-ever scholarly edition of Douglass’s sole work of fiction, his 1853 novella, The Heroic Slave. Edited by Robert S. Levine of the University of Maryland, John Stauffer of Harvard University, and John McKivigan, the longtime editor of the Frederick Douglass Papers, based since 1998 at Indiana University-Purdue University-Indianapolis (IUPUI), and published by the Yale University Press, The Critical and Cultural Edition of The Heroic Slave provides, for the first time, an authoritative text, along with assorted contemporary and scholarly documents to help readers engage the novella in its historical, biographical, and literary contexts. Those documents assist readers to better understand what Douglass chose to emphasize and leave out in his telling of the story of the 1841 slave revolt aboard the brig Creole. The Heroic Slave has emerged as a major text in Douglass’s canon, a novella that continues to fascinate readers with its compelling vision of reform, black revolution, and the quest for human freedom.