The 'Color-Line' Criticism: Literary Fiction, Historical Facts, and the Critical Controversies about William Styron’s "The Confessions of Nat Turner"

• Authors: Kamionowski, Jerzy

Abstracts

EN

This article analyses critical responses to William Styron’s "The Confessions of Nat Turner", claiming that the reception of the novel was strongly determined by the question of race and the different perception-and-interpretation of a “common” history by black and white Americans. I demonstrate that the polemics about Styron’s novel resulted not only from an entirely different understanding by white and black critics of the question as to what literature is essentially and what social role it has to perform, but also from the incompatible implementation of historiography, in the realm of which both sides placed the novel. I argue that, as a result, the critical controversies about "The Confessions" were drawn along the so-called “color line”, a category which traditionally defined Americans according to their race.

Keywords

EN

American history; color line; criticism; historical facts; historical novel; literary fiction; race; slavery

• Publisher: The University of Bialystok
• Journal: Crossroads. A Journal of English Studies
• Year: 2014
• Volume: 7

Dates

published

2014

Contributors

author

Kamionowski, Jerzy

Identifiers

URI

http://hdl.handle.net/11320/3111

DOI

10.15290/cr.2014.07.4.02