The Idea of Authorship in Early African American and Native American Literatures

FAIN: FT-249099-16

Katherine Leigh Chiles
University of Tennessee, Knoxville (Knoxville, TN 37916-3801)

A book-length study of collaborative authorship in early African American and Native American literature.

Raced Collaboration tells the rich story of how-often against significant odds-early African Americans and Native Americans produced English language texts. Despite the fact that the majority of these works were produced through collaboration, Raced Collaboration is the first comprehensive study of the crucial role that collaboration played in early African American and Native American literatures. While much scholarship on antebellum American literature still has a propensity to focus on writers who we tend to think created their writings alone, this book investigates the remarkable--but heretofore unremarked upon--ways that these writers practiced many kinds of collaboration, in order to open up new understandings of the primary works and of the broader issue of authorship; to deepen our appreciation of what early African Americans and Native Americans have done with forms of communication; and to broaden our understanding of the literatures produced in antebellum America.