Marie or, Slavery in the United States

A Novel of Jacksonian America

Gustave de Beaumont author Barbara Chapman translator Gerard Fergerson editor

Format:Paperback

Publisher:Johns Hopkins University Press

Published:26th Jan '99

Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back

Marie or, Slavery in the United States cover

Gustave de Beaumont's 1835 work, Marie, or Slavery in the United States is structured as a fascinating essay on race interwoven with a novel. It is the story of socially forbidden love between an idealistic young Frenchman and an apparently white American woman with African ancestry. The couple's idealism fades as they repeatedly face racial prejudice and violence, and are eventually forced to seek shelter among exiled Cherokee people. Notable as the first abolitionist novel to focus on racial prejudice rather than bondage as a social evil, Beaumont's work was also the first to link prejudice against Native Americans to prejudice against blacks. This translation, with a new introduction by Gerard Fergerson, provides modern readers with interesting insights into the inconsistencies and injustices of democratic Jacksonian society.

Beaumont's chef-d'oeuvre was, and has remained, illuminating . . . It follows that to readers of the present work the book of 1835 will seem strangely and wonderfully familiar . . . Marie will be a book of echoes.
—George Wilson Pierson, Tocqueville in America

ISBN: 9780801860645

Dimensions: 229mm x 152mm x 15mm

Weight: 397g

288 pages