Seeking a New American Narrative: John Brown on the Borders of Historical Memory

Jeff Johnson

《小說與戲劇》 25卷2期 (2016/06) Pp. 59-88

https://doi.org/10.6271/fd.2016.25.2.03

並列摘要

The resurgent interest of U.S. novelists since the 1990s in the radical abolitionist John Brown is linked to their search to represent a multiethnic nation within a singular American narrative located either in the past or the present. This essay focuses on recent fictional representations of Brown on the Borders - the Kansas Territory of the 1850s - where he became notorious as the formal boundaries of the U.S. national state were being extended into unsettled terrain. These novels reflect on the memory of Brown's actions by those who participated in them (Russell Banks' Cloudsplitter, 1998; James McBride's The Good Lord Bird, 2013) as well as those who have inherited a connection to those actions (Marilynne Robinson's Gilead, 2004). The possibility of Brown's history serving as a unifying national narrative is tested but not finally endorsed, because Brown's own hopes for an egalitarian multiracial society still remain unrealized.

並列關鍵字

History ； Memory ； Narrative

參考文獻

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Banks, Russell(1999).Cloudsplitter: A Novel.New York:Harper Perennial.

Banks, Russell(1998)."The Art of Fiction No. 152." Interview.Paris Review.147

Banks, Russell(2000).Who Will Tell the People?.Harper's Magazine.300,83-88.

Beck, Janet Kemper(2009).Creating the John Brown Legend: Emerson, Thoreau, Douglass, Child and Higginson in Defense of the Raid on Harper's Ferry.Jefferson, NC:McFarland.