Nat Turner's Confessions
The Confessions of Nat Turner (original title The Confessions of Nat Turner ) is a historical novel published in 1967 by the American writer William Styron (1925-2006). Styron received the Pulitzer Prize in 1968 and the William Dean Howells Medal of the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1970 . The Time Magazine chose the novel of the 100 best English-language novels from 1923 to 2005.
It is about the last great slave revolt in US history , which was put down in Virginia in 1831 , and allegedly represents the "confessions" of its charismatic leader Nat Turner (1800–1831), recorded shortly before his execution. Such a document actually exists and was published in 1831 - also under the title The Confessions of Nat Turner - by the lawyer Thomas Ruffin Gray, who interviewed Turner at the time in prison. In his more than eight hundred-page novel, Styron goes far beyond this historical (and ideologically heavily burdened) source and tries, on the one hand, to paint a moral picture of the slave and slave-owning society of the southern states in the period before the civil war , and on the other hand, to paint the difficult personality of the historical Turner to fathom.
The Confessions of Nat Turner became a bestseller and was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1968 , but it sparked a heated controversy that reached far beyond the limits of the literary world. The novel was often ostracized as racist by black civil rights activists , although Styron's decision to describe the events from Turner's first-person perspective gave rise to bad memories of the “ blackface ” theater of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Styron's attempt at literary reconstruction was defended by James Baldwin , the politically most powerful Afro-American writer of his time. Renowned critics like Philip RAHV or George Steiner confirmed Styron a fair representation of people of color in The Confessions of Nat Turner .
expenditure
- The Confessions of Nat Turner . Random House, New York 1968. (American first edition)
- Nat Turner's Confessions . German by Norbert Wölfl. Droemer Knaur, Munich 1968. (German first edition)
Web links
- SA French: The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967) - Article in the Encyclopedia Virginia (2011, English).
- William Styron - Interviewed by George Plimpton . Interview in English with statements from Styron on the controversy surrounding The Confessions of Nat Turner . Originally published in 1998 in the 150th edition of The Paris Review . Retrieved July 24, 2014.
Individual evidence
- ↑ "100 Best English-language Novels from 1923 to 2005" , Time Magazine , April 17, 2009
- ↑ On this controversy, cf. also Styron's own account and statements on Baldwin's role in a 1998 interview in The Paris Review (see web link below).
- ↑ See Franz Link: The Confessions of Nat Turner, 1967, in: Franz Link: American narrators since 1950: Themes, Contents, Forms, Schöningh, Paderborn 1993, ISBN 3-506-70822-8 , pp. 51-53, here P. 53.