Portraiture of African American Characters in Southern Literature Before and After the American Civil War: A Stylistic Study

Abstract

This study comprehends an analysis of elements of style and linguistic characterization together with discourse analysis to observe how African American characters were portrayed by white authors before and after the American Civil War in southern literature. The corpus of this study consists of two stories, "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn", written by Mark Twain in 1884-5 but settled 30 to 40 years before, and "An Incident and Other Happenings", written by Sarah Barnwell Elliott in 1899. The study focuses on some elements within the theoretical framework of stylistics, with special attention to linguistic characterization, and some elements of the theoretical framework of ideology in discourse.