Freeing the Soul

Freeing the Soul is a critical literary study of slave narrative, focusing on the texts of Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs, nineteenth-century contemporaries and two of the most widely-read authors of US slave narratives. By contrasting representations of the heroic, solitary male slave narrator with the domestic, community-oriented female, Harryette Mullen identifies marked differences in these authors' conceptualisations of gender, literacy and freedom. A powerful analysis of the politics of gender, Freeing the Soul is a major contribution to the study of African-American literature and literary tradition.