‘His Complete History’? Revisioning, Recreating and Reimagining Multiple Lives in Frederick Douglass's<i>Life and Times</i>(1881, 1892)

Abstract Frederick Douglass's final autobiography, Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, remains a critically neglected work. On first glance, the Frederick Douglass of editions of this work published in the 1880s and 1890s seems to be a million miles away from the fiery, charismatic radical of the 1840s and 1850s. Probe deeper, however, and continuities remain vis-à-vis Douglass's commitment to literary experimentation in radical recreations, representations and reimaginations of an ever shifting and even contradictory public selfhood. Thus, Douglass's final work performs the deflating but fascinating work of a magician seeming to reveal the secret of his trick as he provides his readers with a self-reflexive, hybrid work in which he refuses to shy away from the ambiguities and ambivalences of his multiple existences. Notes Frederick Douglass, Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, Written by Himself. His Early Life as a Slave, His Escape from Bondage, and His Complete History to the Present Time, introd. George L. Ruffin (Boston: De Wolf, 1892), 620, http://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/dougl92/dougl92.html (accessed 8 June 2009). Hereafter identified in the text in parentheses by the abbreviation LT followed by the page number. William L. Andrews, ed., The Oxford Frederick Douglass Reader (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 21, 164, 315. William S. McFeely, Frederick Douglass (New York: Norton, 1991), 311. See Kenneth W. Warren, ‘Frederick Douglass's Life and Times: Progressive Rhetoric and the Problem of Constituency’, in Frederick Douglass: New Literary and Historical Essays, ed. Eric J. Sundquist (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 253–270; Waldo E. Martin, Jr., The Mind of Frederick Douglass (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984); Fionnghuala Sweeney, Frederick Douglass and the Atlantic World (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2007); James Matlack, ‘The Autobiographies of Frederick Douglass’, Phylon 40, no. 1 (1979): 15–28; William L. Andrews, ‘Reunion in the Postbellum Slave Narrative: Frederick Douglass and Elizabeth Keckley’, Black American Literature Forum 23, no. 1 (1989): 5–16; Robert S. Levine, Dislocating Race and Nation: Episodes in Nineteenth-Century American Literary Nationalism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008). At the time of this article's going to press, The Frederick Douglass Papers project at Yale University Press has finalised the concluding volume in its autobiographies series. This publication will consist of an up-to-date critical edition of Douglass's Life and Times. For further information, see http://www.iupui.edu/~douglass/scheduleofpublications.html (accessed September 2011). Frederick Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom (New York: Miller, Orton and Mulligan, 1855), 177, http://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/douglass55/douglass55.html (accessed 8 June 2009). Hereafter identified in the text in parentheses by the abbreviation MBMF followed by the page number. McFeely, Frederick Douglass, 311. Levine, Dislocating Race, 183. McFeely, Frederick Douglass, 311. See Douglass's speech, The Lessons of the Hour (Baltimore: Press of Thomas and Evans, 1894), http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/ampage?collId=mfd&fileName=26/26001/26001page.db&recNum=1 (accessed 10 June 2009). Ibid. Andrews, Oxford Frederick Douglass, 315. Martin, Mind of Frederick Douglass, 272. Warren, ‘Frederick Douglass's Life and Times’, 254. McFeely, Frederick Douglass, 311. Matlack, ‘Autobiographies’, 25. Ibid. Ibid. McFeely, Frederick Douglass, 311. Ibid. See John Stauffer, The Black Hearts of Men: Radical Abolitionists and the Transformation of Race (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 46. See Frederick Douglass's description of the difficult search for black heroism in his novella The Heroic Slave, in Autographs for Freedom, ed. Julia Griffiths (Boston: John P. Jewett, 1853), 175, http://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/douglass1853/douglass1853.html (accessed 8 June 2009). McFeely, Frederick Douglass, 312. Matlack, ‘Autobiographies’, 26. Further evidence regarding Douglass's description of his difficult search for freedom fighter Madison Washington can be found in The Heroic Slave (176). Additional informationNotes on contributorsCeleste-Marie Bernier Celeste-Marie Bernier is Associate Professor in the School of American and Canadian Studies, University of Nottingham, University Park, Nottingham NG7 2RD, UK.

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