Izvestiya of Saratov University.
ISSN 1817-7115 (Print)
ISSN 2541-898X (Online)


Abolitionism

“Breaking Heart to the Time of Laughter”: Sentimental and Comic Image of the Blacks in American Literature and Culture of the 18th – the Beginning of the 20th Century

The paper considers the bipolar racial model representing African Americans in tragic and / or comic modality in American literature and culture (18th – the beginning of the 20th century). This model was formed in the 18th – beginning 19th century, continued to exist in American abolitionist writings, minstrelsy and plantation novel during the 19th century; having been absorbed by the Black American literary tradition, it underwent a considerable change especially in the Harlem Renaissance period.

John Woolman’s image in the English non-fi ction in the 1850–1940s: Hagiographical motives

John Woolman, an 18th century Quaker preacher, is known in the history of American literature for his spiritual autobiography titled The Journal (1774). The 1850–1940s is a period when Woolman’s autobiographical character attracts the attention of British and American critics and essay writers. They publish a signifi cant number of non-fi ction texts, which contain numerous elements of hagiography in Woolman’s portraiture, depicting him as a saintly proto-abolitionist fi gure.