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Title: Clotel; Or, the President's Daughter: A Narrative of Slave Life in the United States (Bedford Cultural Editions) by William Wells Brown, Robert S. Levine ISBN: 0-312-15265-5 Publisher: Bedford/St. Martin's Pub. Date: December, 2000 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $12.10 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.5 (2 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: The Reality Hits Us ALL
Comment: This is a exemplary novel that also deals with the harsh realities of slavery. This novel distinctly tells a true story, which is relevant to ALL Americans (believe it or not. This is a must reader for ALL.
Rating: 4
Summary: rediscovered classic, gets the treatment it deserves
Comment: This, reader, is an unvarnished narrative of one doomed by the laws of the Southern States to be a slave. It tells not only its own story of grief, but speaks of a thousand wrongs and woes beside, which never see the light; all the more bitter and dreadful, because no help can relieve, no sympathy can mitigate, and no hope can cheer. -William Wells Brown, Clotel, or The President's Daughter
Clotel would have historic interest simply by virtue of the fact that William Wells Brown appears to have been the first African American to write a novel. But it's not merely a literary curiosity; it is also an eminently readable and emotionally powerful, if forgivably melodramatic, portrait of the dehumanizing horrors of slave life in the Ante-bellum South. Brown, himself an escaped slave, tells the story of the slave Currer and her daughters, Clotel and Althesa, and of their attempts to escape from slavery. The central conceit of the story is that the unacknowledged father of the girls is Thomas Jefferson himself.
There is an immediacy to the stories here--of slave auctions, of families being torn apart, of card games where humans are wagered and lost, of sickly slaves being purchased for the express purpose of resale for medical experimentation upon their imminent deaths, of suicides and of many more indignities and brutalities--which no textbook can adequately convey. Though the characters tend too much to the archetypal, Brown does put a human face on this most repellent of American tragedies. He also makes extensive use (so extensive that he has been accused, it seems unfairly, of plagiarism) of actual sermons, lectures, political pamphlets, newspaper advertisements, and the like, to give the book something of a docudrama effect.
The Bedford Cultural Edition of the book, edited by Robert S. Levine, has extensive footnotes and a number of helpful essays on Brown and on the sources, even reproducing some of them verbatim. Overall, it gives the novel the kind of serious presentation and treatment which it deserves, but for obvious reasons has not received in the past. Brown's style is naturally a little bit dated and his passions are too distant for us to feel them immediately, but as you read the horrifying scenes of blacks being treated like chattel, you quickly come to share his moral outrage at this most shameful chapter in our history.
GRADE : B
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Title: Our Nig : or, Sketches from the Life of a Free Black by Harriet E. Wilson ISBN: 1400031206 Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 16 April, 2002 List Price(USD): $12.00 |
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Title: Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Jacobs ISBN: 0486419312 Publisher: Dover Pubns Pub. Date: 09 November, 2001 List Price(USD): $2.00 |
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Title: Iola Leroy by Frances E.W. Harper ISBN: 0807065196 Publisher: Beacon Press Pub. Date: 10 December, 1999 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
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Title: The Magazine Novels of Pauline Hopkins (Shomburg Library of 19th Century Black Women Writers) by Pauline E. Hopkins, Hazel Z. Carby ISBN: 0195063252 Publisher: Oxford Press Pub. Date: July, 1990 List Price(USD): $18.95 |
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Title: The Garies and Their Friends (Race in the Americas) by Frank J. Webb, Harriet B. Stowe, Robert Reid-Pharr ISBN: 0801855977 Publisher: Johns Hopkins Univ Pr Pub. Date: December, 1997 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
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