![]() The series adaptation is directed by Barry Jenkins, known for directing the Best Picture-winning film Moonlight in 2016 and critically acclaimed If Beale Street Could Talk in 2018. Colson Whitehead’s 2016 novel The Underground Railroad took the metaphorical Underground Railroad moniker to the literal sense in a young girl’s search for freedom as she escapes plantations and foes in the antebellum South. GradeSaver, 14 April 2019 Web.Amazon Prime just released a 10-episode limited series adaptation of The Underground Railroad, bringing the tragic tale to life with a brilliant cast of new and familiar faces. "The Underground Railroad Slave Narratives and the “Real” Underground Railroad". Next Section Literary Elements Previous Section Imagery Buy Study Guide How To Cite in MLA Format Rothstein, Talia. This literary choice allows the story of his protagonist, Cora, to conjure the voices of the thousands of heroic slaves who took it upon themselves to seek freedom. And by converting a metaphor into a real machine, Whitehead makes concrete the labor required to seek freedom. His own novel is written in much the same style. In an interview with National Public Radio in 2016, Whitehead comments that the tones of the slave narratives he read were often quite matter-of-fact. Whitehead embarked on a thorough investigation of this literary genre as research for the writing of The Underground Railroad. However, thousands of such accounts exist. The most famous of the genre are those published by prominent black abolitionists Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs. In the 1930s, however, the Works Progress Administration under President Franklin Delano Roosevelt began cataloging oral histories under the title, “Slave Narrative Collection.” The fugitive slave narrative, as the genre came to be known, was written by any number of slaves who survived their experiences riding the Underground Railroad and came to publish accounts of their travels. Yet there is certainly disagreement about historians over the nature of the Underground Railroad-was it a coherent, organized network, or an absolutely chaotic myth (Goodheart)? The sources that provide clarity into these questions were long neglected by American historians, literary scholars, and the public. A patchwork network of “stations”-in reality only safe houses-stretched northward through to Canada. Estimates put the number of workers, white and black, at 3,200, which included about 500 former fugitives who returned as Railroad operatives (Bial 8). He exclaimed, “He must have gone on an underground railroad!” That was in 1831 indeed, the Railroad was most active in the sixty years before the American Civil War (1861-5). In close pursuit, his master arrived on the other side of a river bank only to discover Davids was nowhere to be found. One theory for its first use describes an incident between a runaway slave named Tice Davids and his master in Ohio. The term “Underground Railroad” is an unofficial one, making its origins hard to trace. But what actually was the Underground Railroad, and how does its historical importance figure in Whitehead’s novel? The notion of the Underground Railroad is widely taught in American public schools, and thus Whitehead can rely on a shared national understanding to execute the central conceit of the novel. In reality, the Underground Railroad is the symbolic name for the networks across America used by fugitive slaves and their allies to facilitate escape. ![]() Colson Whitehead's fictional Underground Railroad is a literal train line that runs across America, built by former slaves for their own liberation.
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