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    Study Guide for Book Clubs: The Underground Railroad: Study Guides for Book Clubs, #28
    Study Guide for Book Clubs: The Underground Railroad: Study Guides for Book Clubs, #28
    Study Guide for Book Clubs: The Underground Railroad: Study Guides for Book Clubs, #28
    Ebook78 pages1 hour

    Study Guide for Book Clubs: The Underground Railroad: Study Guides for Book Clubs, #28

    By Kathryn Cope

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    About this ebook

    Whether you are a member of a reading group, or simply reading The Underground Railroad for pleasure, this clear and concise guide, written by a specialist in literature, will greatly enhance your reading experience. A comprehensive guide to Colson Whitehead's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, this discussion aid includes a wealth of information and resources: useful literary and historical context; an author biography; a plot synopsis; analyses of themes & imagery; character analysis; thought-provoking discussion questions; recommended further reading and even a quick quiz. For those in book clubs, this useful companion guide takes the hard work out of preparing for meetings and guarantees productive discussion. For solo readers, it encourages a deeper examination of a richly complex text.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherKathryn Cope
    Release dateFeb 23, 2018
    ISBN9781386207917
    Study Guide for Book Clubs: The Underground Railroad: Study Guides for Book Clubs, #28
    Author

    Kathryn Cope

    Kathryn Cope graduated in English Literature from Manchester University and obtained her master’s degree in contemporary fiction from the University of York. She is the author of Study Guides for Book Clubs and the HarperCollins Offical Book Club Guide series. She lives in the Staffordshire Moorlands with her husband, son and dog.

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      Book preview

      Study Guide for Book Clubs - Kathryn Cope

      Introduction

      There are few things more rewarding than getting together with a group of like-minded people and discussing a good book. Book club meetings, at their best, are vibrant, passionate affairs. Each member will bring along a different perspective and ideally there will be heated debate.

      A surprising number of book club members, however, report that their meetings have been a disappointment. Even though their group loved the particular book they were discussing, they could think of astonishingly little to say about it. Failing to find interesting discussion angles for a book is the single most common reason for book group discussions to fall flat. Most book groups only meet once a month and a lacklustre meeting is frustrating for everyone.

      Study Guides for Book Clubs were born out of a passion for book clubs. Packed with information, they take the hard work out of preparing for a meeting and ensure that your book group discussions never run dry. How you choose to use the guides is entirely up to you. The author biography, historical, and literary context sections provide useful background information which may be interesting to share with your group at the beginning of your meeting. The all-important list of discussion questions, which will probably form the core of your meeting, can be found towards the end of this guide. To support your responses to the discussion questions, you may find it helpful to refer to the ‘Themes & Imagery’ and ‘Character’ sections.

      A plot synopsis is provided as an aide-memoire if you need to recap on the finer points of the plot. There is also a quick quiz - a fun way to test your knowledge and bring your discussion to a close. Finally, if this was a book that you particularly enjoyed, the guide concludes with a list of books similar in style or subject matter.

      Be warned, this guide contains spoilers. Please do not be tempted to read it before you have read the original novel as plot surprises will be well and truly ruined.

      Kathryn Cope, 2016

      The Underground Railroad

      One of the most eagerly anticipated novels of 2016, Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad was released a month early to meet public demand. Some of the excitement over the novel was generated by praise from celebrities. Oprah Winfrey chose it for her hugely popular Book Club while Barack Obama also recommended the novel to the American public. Whitehead’s novel is much more, however, than a literary flavour-of-the-month. Literary critics have also agreed that The Underground Railroad is one of the most remarkable novels to tackle the legacy of American slavery since Toni Morrison’s Beloved.

      The Underground Railroad begins with a prologue recounting the story of Ajarry. Ajarry is an African woman who is kidnapped, sold into slavery and shipped to America where she is sold on repeatedly, ending her days on the Randall cotton plantation in Georgia. Years later Ajarry’s daughter, Mabel, has escaped the plantation leaving her own daughter, Cora, to fend for herself. Treated as a pariah by the other slaves and raped when she reaches puberty, Cora still refuses to contemplate taking the same risk as her mother, until she is singled out by the plantation’s sadistic owner as a new concubine. At this point she agrees to make a bid for freedom with Caesar, a fellow slave. With the help of underground railroad agents, Cora and Caesar begin a quest to find a state that will offer them liberty and equality. It soon becomes apparent, however, that while some American states appear more benevolent than others, each one seeks control over African Americans, from capping how much they can earn to limiting population numbers. Also threatening their quest for freedom are the slave patrollers who have the jurisdiction to search for and capture runaway slaves, even within the free states. Pursuing Cora throughout her journey is the infamous slave catcher, Arnold Ridgeway, who, having failed to recapture Cora’s mother years earlier, makes retrieving her daughter his life’s mission.

      One of the reasons for the buzz around this novel is the startlingly original way in which the author treats his subject matter. As Whitehead has said in interview, I’m dealing with serious race issues, but I’m not handling them in a way that people expect.  While the story is inspired by genuine nineteenth century slave narratives, it is also strongly influenced by Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, as well as introducing elements of magic realism. The result is a truly extraordinary mixture of realism, satire and speculative fiction. Imagine, if you can, Twelve Years a Slave, meets The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn meets One Hundred Years of Solitude and you might be close to the mood of Whitehead’s novel. At the centre of this surreal mix is the author’s concept of the underground railroad as not only a network of activists who helped runaway slaves, but also as a literal railway with a track and stations hidden underground. Whitehead then extends this fantastical idea by providing the railroad with the properties of a time machine. While everything that Cora observes on her journey is based, at least loosely, on historical events, some of the incidents covered (such as the application of eugenics and medical experimentation on African Americans) did not take place until the first half of the twentieth century. Whitehead draws attention to the slippery quality of time in his novel by introducing obvious anachronisms, such as a skyscraper erected in the middle of nineteenth century

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