Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Introduction: Frederick Douglass and the Atlantic World
- 1 ‘The Republic of Letters’: Frederick Douglass, Ireland and the Irish Narratives
- 2 Friends and Allies: The Economics of the Text
- 3 An American Slave: Representing the Creole Self
- 4 The Hidden Ireland: Social Commentary and Public Witness
- 5 ‘Mask in Motion’: Dialect Spaces and Class Representation
- 6 Race, Civilization, Empire
- 7 Models of Progress: Ireland, Haiti and the Atlantic
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Index
5 - ‘Mask in Motion’: Dialect Spaces and Class Representation
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Introduction: Frederick Douglass and the Atlantic World
- 1 ‘The Republic of Letters’: Frederick Douglass, Ireland and the Irish Narratives
- 2 Friends and Allies: The Economics of the Text
- 3 An American Slave: Representing the Creole Self
- 4 The Hidden Ireland: Social Commentary and Public Witness
- 5 ‘Mask in Motion’: Dialect Spaces and Class Representation
- 6 Race, Civilization, Empire
- 7 Models of Progress: Ireland, Haiti and the Atlantic
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Douglass's writings, his autobiographies in particular, have long been cornerstones of the literary and historiographical scholarship generated around his life and work. Other major sources have included Douglass's private correspondence and editorial writing, with the letters in particular casting light on a range of relationships, public and private, throughout his career. The publication of Series One of the Douglass Papers: Speeches, Debates and Interviews by John Blassingame from 1979 to 1986 greatly expanded the body of material readily available to Douglass scholarship, compiling newspaper and other reports of his speechmaking from a wealth of sources, across a fifty-year period from the earliest days of his career. The papers help to round out the public figure Douglass presented, framing him within contemporary institutional politics in the United States. An important corollary of this is that Blassingame's collection allows for a directional change in Douglass scholarship. With their focus on the very public realm of rhetoric and performance, the three volumes in the collection facilitate critical approaches less concerned with genre, textuality or formal, one-to-one relationships than with the contingencies of group interaction in the public sphere. In short, Blassingame's collection suggests that attention to the nature and form of the performative self and its interaction with wider culture is both possible and necessary.
The first formal study of Douglass's training in public speaking and rhetorical inheritance, Gregory Lampe's Frederick Douglass: Freedom's Voice, 1818–1840, appeared in 1998, initiating a directed debate around the issues of voice and rhetorical structure. Lampe's work suggests, amongst other things, a more formalized apprenticeship to the protocols of church and state rhetoric than Douglass's self-fashioning might have allowed. Clearly, Douglass's rhetorical persona was as important to his public and political success as was his writing. Stepto has argued that Douglass's Narrative sees the creation of a public personage who can step confidently forward into the rhetorical world of abolitionist politics. Yet that rhetorical engagement also precedes the production of the narrative, emphasizing the degree to which the public domain of abolitionist politics was an important arena of public debate and self-fashioning.
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- Frederick Douglass and the Atlantic World , pp. 94 - 137Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2007