Reference > Cambridge History > Early National Literature, Part II; Later National Literature, Part I > Dialect Writers > The Negro in Earlier American Literature
  Negro Writers; Douglass; Washington; DuBois; Dunbar Uncle Tom’s Cabin  

CONTENTS · VOLUME CONTENTS · INDEX OF ALL CHAPTERS · BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORD

The Cambridge History of English and American Literature in 18 Volumes (1907–21).
VOLUME XVI. Early National Literature, Part II; Later National Literature, Part I.

V. Dialect Writers.

§ 4. The Negro in Earlier American Literature.


The chief writers who preceded Harris in the attempt to portray negro character were William Gilmore Simms, 9  Edgar Allan Poe, 10  Harriet Beecher Stowe, 11  Stephen Collins Foster, and Irwin Russell. Hector, the negro slave in Simms’s Yemassee (1835), and Jupiter in Poe’s Gold-Bug (1843) are alike in many respects. Both belong to the type of faithful body servant, 12  both are natives of the coastal region of South Carolina, both illustrate a primitive sort of humour, and both speak an anglicized form of Gullah (Gulla) dialect. Of the two, Hector is the better portrayed. His refusal (in Chapter 51) to accept freedom when it is offered to him by his owner is by no means surprising; it is an evidence rather of Simms’s familiarity with negro character and a reminder of the anomalous position in which a freedman in those days found himself. 13  Neither Hector nor Jupiter, however, can be said to have any individuality of his own. They are mere types, not individuals. Apart from their masters they have no separate existence at all.   10
Note 9. See also Book II, Chap. VII. [ back ]
Note 10. See also Book II, Chap. XIV. [ back ]
Note 11. See also Book III, Chap. XI. [ back ]
Note 12. For the body servant in later literature see The Negro in Southern Literature since the War, by B. M. Drake (Dissertation, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, 1898), pp. 21–22. [ back ]
Note 13. See in this connection the powerful story by Joel Chandler Harris, Free Joe and the Rest of the World (in Free Joe and Other Georgian Sketches). [ back ]

CONTENTS · VOLUME CONTENTS · INDEX OF ALL CHAPTERS · BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORD
  Negro Writers; Douglass; Washington; DuBois; Dunbar Uncle Tom’s Cabin  
 
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