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The Plagiarist's Craft: Fugitivity and Theatricality in Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Geoffrey Sanborn
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Abstract

After showing that nine percent of William Craft's Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom is plagiarized in ways that strongly resemble the ways in which William Wells Brown typically plagiarized, I argue that Brown wrote the narrative in tandem with Craft. Recognizing that possibility encourages us to pay closer attention to the formal aspects of Running, whose abrupt tonal shifts and frequent comic digressions make it one of the most peculiar of the major African American slave narratives. Just as Running prolongs, to an extraordinary degree, the intermediate condition of its fugitive protagonists, so does it hold open, by means of its highly theatrical interludes, the prospect of another future, another stage on which black and white Americans might encounter one another.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 128 , Issue 4 , October 2013 , pp. 907 - 922
Copyright
Copyright © 2013 by The Modern Language Association of America

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