ABSTRACT
BRODWIN tackles The Souls of Black Folk as an exercise in literary rhetoric, claiming that only from such an approach can the “true meaning” of the text be derived. To this end he chases the variety of literary techniques deployed by Du Bois, taking the use of allegory, personal confession, (auto)biography, musical motif, Greek myth, biblical allusion, and a range of rhetorical tropes as constituting a conscious attempt on Du Bois’s part to create “an aesthetic commonality between himself and his white reader”.
