![]() ![]() In The Heroic Slave, Douglass developed alternative formal strategies for representing slave interiority in fiction in order to resist the fantasy of complete knowledge of inner life associated with conventional fictional psychonarration. ![]() As fiction became an important genre for representing slavery in the early 1850s, the conventions of fiction, especially its direct narration of unspoken thoughts and feelings, increasingly mediated how white audiences understood their ability to access the inner lives of enslaved persons. ![]() Focusing on The Heroic Slave’s exploration of white people’s desire to probe the inner lives of enslaved persons, the essay argues that The Heroic Slave not only displays Douglass’s skillful deployment of fiction, but also constitutes a complex metafictional engagement with fiction’s increasingly central role in the struggle over slavery. This essay explores how Frederick Douglass’s The Heroic Slave (1853) both reveals and intervenes in the often-implicit controversies over the accessibility of slave interiority for white audiences that underpinned competing representations of slavery in the antebellum public sphere. ![]()
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