The Development of Slave Narrative into a Novelistic Genre in the Context of the Secularization of Nineteenth-Century American Society

2016 Fiscal Year Final Research Report

• Project/Area Number: 26370307
• Research Category: Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C)
• Allocation Type: Multi-year Fund
• Section: 一般
• Research Field: Literature in English
• Research Institution: Hirosaki University
• Principal Investigator: Hori Tomohiro 弘前大学, 人文社会科学部, 准教授 (10634719)
• Project Period (FY): 2014-04-01 – 2017-03-31
• Keywords: Frederick Douglass / slave narrative / conversion narrative / 世俗化

Outline of Final Research Achievements

This study examined the process through which a number of slave narratives such as Frederick Douglass's transformed from a religious genre whose pivotal point of view was God's to a more secular kind of literary genre. While gathering relevant materials at research libraries in the U.S., I gave two oral presentations on this topic and published two articles in academic journals (of which one is a refereed article). Through this study, I found out that the secularization of mid-nineteenth-century American society and its literary texts was closely related with the emergence and development of the discourse of luck, probability, and risk, which should be my next research theme.

Free Research Field

アメリカ文学