Zoe Trodd

Organized around six protest movements and their literature, 1867-2007, this dissertation shows protest texts adapting abolitionist aesthetics. It identifies an abolitionist politics of form, then traces six elements of that form across the protest literature of woman’s rights, labor, anti-lynching, civil rights, black power, and modern anti-slavery/human trafficking. Positioning the literary abolitionists as primary ancestors for modern protest aesthetics, it examines the role of historical memory in creating protest literature. It shows protest writers and artists working against the myth of American history and literature as a series of fresh starts, of America as a perpetual New World. The politics of memory emerges in American protest literature as tightly bound to the politics of form.

Dissertation: "The Reusable Past: Abolitionist Aesthetics in the Protest Literature of the Long Civil Rights Movement"