Minority Reports

MICHAEL BORGSTROM is Assistant Professor of English at San Diego State University, USA.

• Introduction: Identity, History, Narrative What Do We Want from Harriet Wilson? Frank J. Webb and the Fate of the Sentimental Race Man Setting the Record Straight in Uncle Tom's Cabin Frederick Douglass, Whiteness, and the Limits of Knowledge Face Value: Ambivalent Citizenship in Iola Leroy Conclusion: Return from the Beyond

"Borgstrom s Minority Reports is literary and social criticism of the highest order. Although his spirited readings ostensibly concern nineteenth-century American texts - Douglass, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Harriet Wilson among others - the book asks us to commit ourselves to a nuanced understanding of identity and what it can teach us in the present moment. Borgstrom reads Uncle Tom s Cabin through the character Adolph, brilliantly questioning the non-normative gender concerns of the novel; by the same token, his analysis of Iola Leroy reminds us of how badly many of us have misread that complex text. Borgstrom, time and time again, in prose as graceful as it is lucid, explains what all of us know but fail to articulate: how our identities, if imaginatively and intellectually confronted, can teach us about the world and others. This book does just that, and we are all the better for it." - Kenneth A. McClane, W.E.B. Du Bois Professor of Literature, Cornell University "In this cogent reconsideration of the ways constructed identities function in and beyond literary texts, Borgstrom has produced an essential work of scholarship. Minority Reports challenges the conventional wisdom on social identity and returns us to a world of nineteenth-century writing that still speaks volumes about where and who we are today. Along the way, he draws us into a realm of history that can be recovered and understood only through literature. An outstanding achievement." - John Ernest, Eberly Family Distinguished Professor of American Literature, West Virginia University, and author of Chaotic Justice: Rethinking African American Literary History (2009)