Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 1994. [Vol. 2.] Eger Journal of American Studies. (Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 22)

STUDIES - László Dányi: Nat Turner: History that Fiction Makes, or Fiction that History Makes?

that the 60s were "youth oriented, radical, counter cultural, easy-riding, committed to New Left ideology, minority rights, black consciousness, and to drugs, rock music, psychedelic experiences, protest and dissent"

2 This shift also brought about more varied and more subtle answers to the uneasy questions of the black experience in America's belligerent past, and in order to establish a more favorable image of black Americans, a radical revision of this group's past was necessary. I think in the process of remedying a negative heritage the need for cultural heroes, of which Nat Turner could be one, was becoming more pronounced, and more and more elements of black culture penetrated into the dominant white culture. Southern blacks, who tried to manipulate the mass media and using civil disobedience as a tactic, won the support of the northern public and obtained legal representation through public-interest law firms and, to boost race consciousness, they created their own mythic cultural heroes. These processes led to the revival of the Nat Turner image by interpreting him as a freedom fighter. During the Second Reconstruction of the 1960s Nat Turner and his slave revolt were revalued because the "slave revolt was justified on the familiar basis of resisting legal but oppressive forces: the cruelties of slavery in Virginia (on a moral basis). Nat Turner's tough defiance in a hostile white world was the stuff of black heroism with no need for moral justification. Glorified 'social bandits' have long served significant psychological, sociological and mythological functions for those who feel frustrated, victimized and powerless,"

3 which is a type of social myth therapy. Styron started to write The Confessions because he wished to express the subtlety and the complexity of this emerging black heritage and thus of the slave past, especially the latter's complexity. He accepted György Lukács's principles on writing historical novels, and viewed the disregard of 2 Daniel Snowman and Malcolm Bradbury, "The Sixties and Seventies," Introduction to American Studies, ed. Malcolm Bradbury & Howard Temperley (London & New York: Longman, 1981) 326. o Charles Reagan Wilson and William Ferris, coeds., Encyclopedia of Southern Culture (Chapel Hill and London: The University of North Carolina Press, 1989) 1491—1492. 34