Nat Turner before the bar of judgment
Subtitle: fictional treatments of the Southampton slave insurrection
By: Mary Kemp Davis.
Series: Southern literary studies
Publisher: Louisiana State University Press
Published: 1999
Place of publication: Baton Rouge
Language: eng
Number of pages: 298
Subjects: Turner, Nat, 1800?-1831 -- In literature.; Southampton Insurrection, 1831 -- Literature and the insurrection.; Literature and history -- Virginia -- History -- 19th century.; Slave insurrections -- Virginia -- Historiography.; American fiction -- 19th century -- History and criticism.; American fiction -- 20th century -- History and criticism.; Historical fiction, American -- History and criticism.; African Americans in literature.; Slavery in literature.
Description: An icon in African American history, Nat Turner has generated almost every kind of cultural product, including the historical, imaginative, scholarly, folk, polemical, and reflective. In Nat Turner Before the Bar of Judgment, Mary Kemp Davis offers an original, in-depth analysis of six novels in which Turner figures prominently.

This Virginia rebel slave, she argues, has been re-arraigned, retried, and re-sentenced repeatedly during the last century and a half as writers have grappled with the social and moral issues raised by his (in)famous 1831 revolt. Though usually lacking a literal trial, the novels Davis examines all have the theme of judgment at their center, and she ingeniously unravels the "verdict" each author extracts from his or her plot.

According to Davis, all of the novelists derive their fundamental understanding about Turner from Gray's overdetermined text, but they recreate it in their own image. In this fictional tradition that begins with a nineteenth-century romance and ends with postmodern revisions of the form, Davis shows the Turner persona to be multivalent and inherently unstable, each novelist laboring mightily and futilely to arrest it within the confines of art.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.