The return of Nat Turner

"Nat Turner is a powerful symbol in the cultural memory of America. Prophet, rebel, and leader of the bloodiest slave insurrection in American history, Turner has fascinated and influenced historians and fiction writers alike." "In The Return of Nat Turner, primarily a cultural study of sixties America, Albert E. Stone presents a comprehensive history of the various representations of the violent or rebellious slave in American culture and examines the Nat Turner rebellion as both historical fact and cultural narrative." "Beginning with Thomas R. Gray's 1831 pamphlet The Confessions of Nat Turner (published the same year as the Southampton, Virginia, slave revolt), Stone evaluates representations of Turner by such influential historians as Eugene Genovese, Kenneth Stampp, and John Hope Franklin, and in various works of fiction including Arna Bontemps's Black Thunder (1936), Daniel Panger's Ol' Prophet Nat (1967), and Sherley Anne Williams's Dessa Rose (1986)." "But for Stone, the most crucial revival of Nat Turner's legend is William Styron's 1967 novel The Confessions of Nat Turner, the controversial book largely responsible for Turner's "return" in the sixties. This fictional account of the rebellion became the decade's storm center of debate by focusing on sensitive social and ideological questions about American culture--questions pertaining to slavery and racism, violence and revolution, religion, sex, personal identity, and heroism." "The Return of Nat Turner is the first study to situate Styron's novel at the center of a large, complex, and significant web of cultural imaginings. Nat Turner still symbolizes for many Americans the issues and values that divided us in the tumultuous sixties and continue to create dissension in the nineties."--BOOK JACKET.