Title: Nat Turner before the bar of judgment
First published: 1999
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.
Subjects: African Americans in literature, American Historical fiction, American fiction, Historical fiction, American, Historiography, History, History and criticism, In literature, Literature and history, Literature and the insurrection, Slave insurrections, Slavery in literature, Southampton Insurrection, 1831, Turner, nat, 1800?-1831, Slave insurrections, united states, American fiction, history and criticism, 19th century, American fiction, history and criticism, 20th century, Historical fiction, history and criticism, Literatur, Sklavenaufstand, Sklaverei <Motiv>, Rezeption, Littérature et histoire, Histoire, Révoltes d'esclaves, Historiographie, Roman américain, Histoire et critique, Noirs américains dans la littérature, Esclavage dans la littérature, LITERARY CRITICISM, American, General, Literature
Places: Virginia
People: Nat Turner (1800?-1831)
Time periods: 19th century, 20th century
LC classification: PS374.S725 D38 1999