Philadelphia Stories: America's Literature of Race and Freedom

Philadelphia Stories analyzes the narratives about race, character, manners, violence, and freedom that unfold across a range of texts written in and about Philadelphia between 1790 and 1860. Philadelphia was seen as the stage on which racial character would be tested and a possible post-slavery future played out. Otter argues that this setting produced a largely unacknowledged literary tradition of peculiar forms and intensities, in which verbal performanceand social behavior assumed the weight of race and nation.