Telling Narratives

"Telling Narratives analyzes key texts from nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century African American literature to demonstrate how secrets and their many tellings have become slavery's legacy. This study focuses on the ways secrets are told in abolitionist texts and in novels of uplift, including those by William Wells Brown, Jessie Fauset, Charles W Chesnutt, Martin Delany, Frances E.W. Harper, Pauline Hopkins, James Weldon Johnson, and Frederick Douglass. In examining how racial and sexual secrets are kept and told in these works, Leslie W. Lewis traces how interaction between masters and…