The ‘American Burns’: Author-Function, Antislavery, and William Wells Brown’s <i>The American Fugitive</i>

More than one author was labelled the ‘American Burns’ in the nineteenth-century. This article explores these constructions through the post-structuralist theory of Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault. Drawing on Foucault’s ‘author-function’, where the author as a person is replaced by the malleable discourse that surrounds his work, it proceeds to examine a largely neglected text in studies of Burns in relation to US abolitionism: William Wells Brown’s The American Fugitive in Europe: Sketches of Places and People Abroad (1855). In doing so, the article demonstrates the ways in which Brown uses Burns’s name to bolster his own antislavery discourse in a travelogue which was predominantly aimed at his American readership.