In the following essay Johnson, a doctoral candidate at Yale University, examines how The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman works as historical fiction and how Gaines makes a single character work both as an individual and as a historical symbol.
Published in 1971, The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman was Ernest J. Gaines's first major critical and popular success. It exemplifies the author's concerns with the relationship between language, identity, and narrative structure. The novel names itself as an autobiography but it is also generally recognized as a work of historical fiction. Gaines's novel functions as an autobiography in so far as it provides a first-person account of the life of a particular person. However, it differs from conventional autobiography in two ways. First, this is the life history of a fictional character as recreated.....
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