Of Human Bondage and Literary Triumphs: Hannah Crafts and the Morphology of the Slave Narrative

Abstract

The discovery and subsequent publication of this "fictionalized autobiography" solves one perplexing literary riddle but replaces it with a more profound cultural conundrum. First, the good news. The publication of the much-storied, handwritten manuscript by Hannah Crafts, or somebody assuming that name, confirms, without any doubt, the existence of what the novelist Ralph Ellison characterized as an unsecured, "free-floating literacy," or a paraliterate culture at the very least, among black slaves in antebellum America. This inchoate and emergent culture, disarticulated from the dominant cultural matrix, was nevertheless strong enough to power a nascent literary tradition.

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