Fact, Fiction, and the Industry of Violence: Newspapers and Advertisements in Clotel

William Wells Brown’s Clotel (1853) is formally complex and features paratextual elements that stymied early critics, who judged the antislavery novel by somewhat rigid generic conventions. As a result, Clotel’s historical significance has often overshadowed its radically experimental aesthetics. The very elements used to deem Clotel aesthetically inferior, namely the inclusion of newspaper articles and advertisements, actually expose and attempt to remedy the representational inadequacies of conventional abolitionist texts. Brown deploys paratexts strategically within Clotel’s fictional narrative in order to undermine readers’ assumptions and challenge them to continually position themselves with and against reified texts.