Chronotopes in Harriet Jacobs's "Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl"

This article employs Bakhtin’s concept of the chronotope to examine the interrelatedness of different places, temporalities, characterization, and values in Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl . Focusing on the complex interactions of four chronotopes—Dr. Flint’s house, the provin...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inAfrican American review Vol. 49; no. 1; pp. 19 - 34
Main Author Troy, Maria Holmgren
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Johns Hopkins University Press 01.03.2016
Subjects
African American studies
Bakhtin
chronotopes
Engelska
English
Grandmothers
Harriet Jacobs
Houses
Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
Narratives
Negotiating Identity
place
Slave narratives
Slavery
Slaves
Temporality
time
White people
Written narratives
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Summary:This article employs Bakhtin’s concept of the chronotope to examine the interrelatedness of different places, temporalities, characterization, and values in Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl . Focusing on the complex interactions of four chronotopes—Dr. Flint’s house, the provincial town, the grandmother’s house, and the garret—the article yields a deeper understanding of how Jacobs critiques antebellum American society and, at the same time, constructs the grandmother’s house as chronotope as a site of negotiation with her most obvious historical addressee: the Northern middle-class white woman.
ISSN:1062-4783
1945-6182
1945-6182
DOI:10.1353/afa.2016.0006