Hostname: page-component-7c8c6479df-fqc5m Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-03-28T18:05:27.167Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

The Travels of William and Ellen Craft: Race and Travel Literature in the 19th Century

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 July 2009

Get access

Extract

Describing their move north in an escape from slavery, William and Ellen Craft's slave narrative, Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom (1860), offers a peculiar form of travel literature. The notion that slave narratives chronicle movement has not gone unrecognized. Indeed, scholarship on 20th-century African-American literature often argues the thematic importance of a journey motif that some trace to antebellum America. Blyden Jackson, for example, notes that African-American “literature bears within itself content, as well as themes and moods, reflecting the Great Migration” (xv), the period from early to mid-20th century, which Marcus E. Jones says actually began before the Civil War when blacks fled the South for the urban, industrial North (30). And Robert Stepto has identified two basic types of journeys in African-American literature: one of “ascent” in which “an ‘enslaved’ and semiliterate figure [travels] on a ritualized journey to a symbolic North,” and one of “immersion,” which is a “ritualized journey into a symbolic South” (6). Such discussions of journey motifs, however, have not yet led to an examination of slave narratives as travel literature.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2000

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

WORKS CITED

Appiah, Kwame Anthony. “Race.” Critical Terms for Literary Study. 2nd ed. Ed. Lentricchia, Frank and McLaughlin, Thomas. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995: 274–87.Google Scholar
Bontemps, Arna. Preface. Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom. Great Slave Narratives. Ed. Bontemps, Arna. Boston: Beacon, 1969. 269.Google Scholar
Brown, Josephine. Biography of an American Bondman, by His Daughter. Boston: R. F. Wallcut, 1856.Google Scholar
Caeser, Terry. “‘Counting the Cats in Zanzibar’: American Travel Abroad in American Travel Writing to 1914.” Prospects 13 (1988): 95134.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Craft, William, and Ellen, Craft. Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom; or, The Escape of William and Ellen Craft from Slavery (1860). Great Slave Narratives. Ed. Bontemps, Arna. Boston: Beacon, 1969: 270331.Google Scholar
Farrison, William Edward. William Wells Brown: Author and Reformer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969.Google Scholar
Foster, Frances Smith. Witnessing Slavery: The Development of Ante-bellum Slave Narratives. 2nd ed.Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1979.Google Scholar
Gwin, Minrose C. “Green-eyed Monsters of the Slavocracy: Jealous Mistresses in Two Slave Narratives.” Conjuring: Black Women, Fiction, and Literary Tradition. Ed. Pryse, Marjorie and Spillers, Hortense J.. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986: 3952.Google Scholar
Hedin, Raymond. “Strategies of Form in the American Slave Narrative.” The Art of the Slave Narrative: Original Essays in Criticism and Theory. Ed. Sekora, John and Turner, Darwin T.. Macomb: Western Illinois University Press, 1982: 2535.Google Scholar
Jackson, Blyden. “Introduction: A Street of Dreams.” Black Exodus: The Great Migration from the American South. Ed. Harrison, Alfredteen. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1991: xixviii.Google Scholar
Jones, Marcus E.Black Migration in the United States with Emphasis on Selected Central Cities. Saratoga, Ca.: Century Twenty One, 1980.Google Scholar
Loewenberg, Bert James, and Ruth, Bogin, eds. Black Women in Nineteenth-Century American Life: Their Words, Their Thoughts, Their Feelings. University Park: Penn State University Press, 1976.Google Scholar
Mason, Mary G.Travel as Metaphor and Reality in Afro-American Women's Autobiography, 1850–1972.” Black American Literature Forum 24 (Summer 1990): 337–56.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Michaels, Walter Benn.Our America: Nativism, Modernism, and Pluralism. Durham: Duke University Press, 1995.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Morrison, Toni. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. New York: Vintage, 1992.Google Scholar
Ripley, C. Peter, ed. The Black Abolitionist Papers. Vol. 1. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985.Google Scholar
Schriber, Mary Suzanne. “Edith Wharton and the Dog-Eared Travel Book.” Wretched Exotic: Essays on Edith Wharton in Europe. Ed. Joslin, Katherine and Price, Alan. New York: Peter Lang, 1993: 147–63.Google Scholar
Schriber, Mary Suzanne, and Ranjini, Philip. “Difference of Signatures: Sophia and Nathaniel Hawthorne.” Commonwealth and American Women's Discourse: Essays in Criticism. Ed. McLeod, A. L.. New Delhi: Sterling, 1995: 365–75.Google Scholar
Schriber, Mary Suzanne. Telling Travels: Selected Writings by Nineteenth-Century American Women Abroad. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1995.Google Scholar
Schriber, Mary Suzanne. Writing Home: American Women Abroad, 1830–1920. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1997.Google Scholar
Stepto, Robert B. “Ascent, Immersion, Narration.” Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God: Modern Critical Interpretations. Ed. Bloom, Harold. New York: Chelsea House, 1981: 517.Google Scholar
Sterling, Dorothy, Black Foremothers: Three Lives. Old Westbury, N.Y.: Feminist, 1979.Google Scholar
Weinauer, Ellen M. “‘A Most Respectable Looking Gentleman’: Passing, Possession, and Transgression in Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom.” Passing and the Fiction of Identity. Ed. Ginsberg, Elaine K.. Durham: Duke University Press, 1996: 3756.Google Scholar