Doctoral Dissertations Available from Proquest. Jensen, Melba P, 'Frederick Douglass's “The Heroic Slave”: Text, context, and interpretation' (2005). Subject AreaĪmerican literature|Black history Recommended Citation His novella attempted to reverse this process by presenting Washington's actions as a battle in an ongoing American revolution. Writing a history of Madison Washington's participation in the Creole rebellion for an audience who had, largely, forgotten the event, offered Douglass the opportunity to examine the connection between enslavement and erasure from national history. House of Representatives in 1852, and the novella reflects Douglass's intellectual and professional development from 1847 to 1852, a period to which his latter autobiographies give relatively little attention. Douglass's emphasis on friendship in the novella was, in part, a response to his collaboration with Gerrit Smith, whom he helped elect to the U.S.

An intertextual reading shows that Douglass was developing a notion of political discourse and action based on friendship as an alternative to Stowe's emphasis on moral reform based on sympathy. Reading The Heroic Slave as an intertextual conversation offers an alternative to the current practice of assigning this work either to the genre of fiction or to the slave narrative, which has subordinated discussion of the historical context for the story's composition to contemporary attempts to theorize the genre of autobiography. The result was an intertextual conversation among Douglass, Stowe, Byron, and the Creole crew, which Douglass used to initiate a series of autobiographical revisions. Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin Or, Life among the Lowly (1852), Lord Byron's Childe Harold's Pilgrimage (1812–18), and the deposition of the Creole crew, called the “New Orleans Protest” (1841). As literary models for his story, Douglass drew on portraits of heroic slaves in his own autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave (1845), Harriet B. In the novella, Douglass attempted to justify his adoption of political methods to the antislavery community. In November 1852, Frederick Douglass composed The Heroic Slave, a novella about Madison Washington's leadership of the 1841 Creole insurrection. Melba P Jensen, University of Massachusetts Amherst Frederick Douglass's “The Heroic Slave”: Text, context, and interpretation

Douglass the heroic slave