The complex interaction between the visual and print culture is central to transitions in definitions and perceptions of Black personhood and to an understanding of mid-century African American literature. Marshaled by race science and underwriting the emergence of the periodical as a media form in the United States through its advertisements for fugitives and enslaved Africans for sale, visuality and its imbrication with print were also mobilized by Black authors to contest those racializing scripts through authorial frontispieces. The mid-century explosion of slave narrative publication and the popularization of photographic portraiture are coincident and imbricated, making visuality and viewing practices central to understanding African American autobiographical texts. In this chapter, Michael Chaney focuses on “ex-fugitive” authorial frontispieces between 1850 and 1854 within the frame of what he calls “embedded gazing and looking relations” scripted by the illustration and phenomenal success of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. In doing so, he traces contestations over visual compositions of “the slave” that he argues form “the emergence of an ‘optic American slave’” during a “volatile juncture” for African American pictorial self-representation in print culture. How might, and did, Black authors challenge what Chaney calls a “viral Uncle Tom”?

This monograph closes with a reading of Sterne’s extra-textual collaboration with Joshua Reynolds and William Hogarth, on frontispieces for his Sermons of Mr. Yorick as well as for Tristram Shandy. These images were both free-standing as well as bookish ones bound within Sterne’s works, and served as important marketable visuals to prospective buyers. This final discussion of design elements beyond the narrative proper of Tristram Shandy demonstrates how, for Sterne, his literary project spanned print media, constructing an image of the man and the book as a print commodity.