Date of Award
Fall 2012
Degree Type
Masters Thesis
Degree Name
Master of Arts (MA)
Department
English
Committee Chair
Ellen Weinauer
Committee Chair Department
English
Abstract
Resistance literature is an established genre, dating back to the late eighteenth century, but it underwent a rhetorical revision as slavery increased within the United States in the years leading up to the Civil War. As slaves and free blacks began to rebel against their oppressed condition, they "stole" two prominent tools whites used_ to - oppress slaves: language and violence. Frederick Douglass's My Bondage and My Freedom is a self-conscious revision within resistance literature that argues for national change by advocating physical violence with written language. Reading this text as an intertext with Nat Turner's "Confessions" reveals the ways in which Douglass reappropriates the "stolen" slave's voice and works to-further abolition in the antebellum era.
Copyright
2012, Allison L. Tharp
Recommended Citation
Tharp, Allison L., ""We Need the Storm, the Whirlwind, the Earthquake": The Intersection of Language and Violence in Nat Turner's "Confessions" and Frederick Douglass's My Bondage and My Freedom" (2012). Master's Theses. 566.
https://aquila.usm.edu/masters_theses/566