| Episodes |
- Adeeko, Adeleke. "Signatures of Blood in William Wells Brown's Clotel." Nineteenth-Century Contexts 21 (1999): 115-34.
- Andrews, William H. "Mark Twain, William Wells Brown, and the Problem of Authority in New Southern Writing." Southern Literature and Literary Theory. Ed. Jefferson Humphries. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1990. 1-21.
- Blair, Sara. "Feeling, Evidence, and the Work of Literary History: Response to duCille." American Literary History 12.3 (2000): 463-66.
- Blair argues that Brown's Clotel can potentially help answer her inquiry: "how do literary and cultural forms create, respond to, and negotiate images of persons 'out of the pale of [our] sympathy'." She presents scholars with several questions, all centered on how we can employ African-American literary studies as a model for historical and rhetorical analysis of American literature at large.
- Crosby, Shelby. "Challenging the Body Politic: William Wells Brown's Clotel; or the President's Daughter and Jeffersonian Republicanism" Over the River and through the Woods: Miscegenation and the American Experiment. Diss. State University of New York at Buffalo, 2007. AAT 3277744
- Dorsey, Peter. "De-Authorizing Slavery: Realism in Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin and Brown's Clotel." ESQ 41 (1995): 256-88.
- duCille, Ann. "Where in the World Is William Wells Brown? Thomas Jefferson, Sally Hemings, and the DNA of African-American Literary History." American Literary History 12.3 (2000): 443-62.
- With a review of the literature concerning the Jefferson-Hemings affair, duCille analyzes the importance of Clotel in the larger bodies of American and African-American literature. She underscores the meaning of the novel's absence in the discussion of the DNA findings, arguing that Clotel has become subsidiary in the aforementioned scholarship. duCille makes a case for the novel's positioning in the center of African-American and American literature but recognizes that it is arguably not representative of the black experience because it is "heavily dependent on the borrowed conventions of 'white' sentimental fiction" and therefore "has never quite walked the party line of the black experience" (453). Moreover, duCuille refutes the claim that William Wells Brown invented and institutionalized the figure of the tragic mulatto, noting Clotel's resolve in escaping her captors and ultimately committing heroic suicide.
- Ellios, Curtis W., and E. W. Metcalf, Jr. William Wells Brown and Martin R. Delany: A Reference Guide. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1978.
- Ellis, R. J. "Body Politics and the Body Politic in William Wells Brown's Clotel and Harriet Wilson's Our Nig." Soft Canons: American Women Writers and Masculine Tradition. Ed. Karen L. Kilcup. Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 1999.
- Engels, Jeremy. "Friend or Foe? Naming the Enemy." Rhetoric and Public Affairs 12.1 (2009): 37-64.
- Ernest, John. Resistance and Reformation in Nineteenth-Century African-American Literature. Jackson: Mississippi UP, 1995. 21-54.
- Fabi, Guilia. "The ‘Unguarded Expressions of the Feelings of Negroes': Gender, Slave Resistance, and William Wells Brown's Revisions of Clotel." African American Review 27.4 (1993): 639-54.
- Farrison, W. Edward. "Clotel, Thomas Jefferson, and Sally Hemings." CLA Journal 17.2 (1973): 147-74.
- Farrison, William. "Clotel; or, The President's Daughter." William Wells Brown: Author and Reformer. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1969.
- Farrison summarizes the plot while addressing a key criticism of Brown's novel: countless anachronisms. Farrison recounts the story while pointing out several inconsistencies in the chronology, explaining how Brown's dates do not align with the historical record. Still, he concludes that Brown's inaccuracies are not the result of negligence but of the author's belief that they "detracted nothing from his portrayal of American slavery as he had come to know it" (231), which was, after all, his objective in writing the novel.
- Farrison, William. "Origins of Brown's Clotel." Phylon 15.4 (1954): 347-54.
- Farrison details the literary progression of Clotel, following Brown's previous work and outside influences up to the point of its publication in 1853. He then offers background information on the allegations of Jefferson's affair, anticipating that some clarification in the matter will help the reader when engaging with Clotel.
- Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., ed. Three Classic African American Novels. New York: Vintage, 1990.
- Gayle, Addison. The Way of the New World: The Black Novel in America. New York: Anchor Press, 1976.
- Getchell, Mary. "'Founded in Truth': William Wells Brown and the Parable of Clotel." Assimilation and Subversion in Earlier American Literature. Ed. Robin DeRosa. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2006.
- Gretchell's chapter examines Brown's "cut-and-paste style" in Clotel, explaining how he successfully merges two "seemingly incompatible genres" of fact and fiction (83, 84). As she explores whether the novel is truly "founded in truth" as claimed by Brown, Gretchell maintains that the best way to access the story is to read it as a parable. Thus, she spends her time explaining how this technique authenticates Brown's work.
- Gilmore, Paul. " 'De Genewine Artekil': William Wells Brown, Blackface Minstrelsy, and Abolitionism." American Literature 69.4 (1997): 743-80.
- Hermance, J. Noel. William Wells Brown and Clotelle: A Portrait of the Artist in the First Negro Novel. Hamden: Archon, 1969.
- Hodin, Stephen B. "A Jeffersonian Legacy: Slavery, Machinery, and Genealogy in William Wells Brown's Clotel." Jefferson's Ghost: Slavery, Machinery, and the Haunting of the literary Imagination in Antebellum America. Diss. Boston University, 2008. [AAT 3298645]
- Hubbard, Dolan. “David Walker's Appeal and the American Puritan Jeremiadic Tradition.†Centennial Review 30.3 (1986): 331-46.
- Johns, Gillian. "'Moral Authority,' History, and the Case of Canonization." Multiculturalism: Roots and Realities. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2002.
- Levine, Robert S. "'Whiskey, Blacking, and All': Temperance and Race in William Wells Brown's Clotel." The Serpent in the Cup: Temperance in American Literature. Ed. David S. Reynolds and Debra J. Rosenthal. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1997. 93-114.
- Levine, Robert S. "Introduction." Clotel, or, The President's Daughter: A Narrative of Slave Life in the United States by William Wells Brown, Ed. Robert S. Levine. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2000.
- Lewis, Richard O. "Literary Conventions in the Novels of William Wells Brown." CLA Journal 29 (1985): 129-56.
- Lucasi, Stephen. "William Wells Brown's Narrative & Traveling Subjectivity." African American Review 41.3 (2007: 521-39.
- Mitchell, Angelyn. "Her Side of His Story: A Feminist Analysis of Two Nineteenth-Century Antebellum Novels -- William Wells Brown's Clotel and Harriet E. Wilson's Our Nig." American Literary Realism 24.3 (1992): 7-21.
- Mitchell offers a feminist critique, positing the two novels as tools of propaganda, each employing its own technique for disseminating information about the institution of slavery. Mitchell asserts that Brown provides a picture of slavery that is "highly romanticized, dramatic, and political" (7). Accordingly, Brown portrays the destruction of slave families as slavery's greatest infraction. Consequently, Mitchell argues that Brown fails to construct complete characterizations of his female characters and criticizes his reduction of the women in his novel to victims of oppression. Contrary to duCille, who maintains that Brown did not invent the tragic mulatto, Mitchell contends that he, in fact, does.
- Mitchell, Douglas L. "The Exasperated Genius of Africa: William Wells Brown and African American History." A Disturbing and Alien Memory: Southern Novelists Writing History. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 2008. 93-126.
- Mitchell, Verner D. "David Walker, African Rights, and Liberty." Multiculturalism: Roots and Realities. Ed. James Trotman. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2002.
- Monteith, Sharon. "America's Domestic Aliens: African Americans and the Issue of Citizenship in the Jefferson/Hemings Story in Fiction and Film." Alien Identities: Exploring Difference in Fiction and Film. Ed. Deborah Cartmell et al. Sterling: Pluto Press, 1999. 31-48.
- Monteith discusses how various authors and filmmakers have situated Sally Hemings within the larger story of race relations in America's democratic history. She details how each work has given the otherwise silent Hemings a voice of her own. Each interpretation of Hemings offers a new lens through which we can view the paradox that is American identity. Through her discussion of authors Annette Gordon-Reed, William Wells Brown, Barbara Chase-Riboud, Fawn Brodie, and Steve Erickson as well as filmmakers Merchant and Ivory, Monteith gives us a brief look at how fiction and history come together to give Hemings a significant presence.
- Nabers, Deak. "The Problem of Revolution in the Age of Slavery: Clotel, Fiction, and the Government of Man." Representations 91.1 (2005): 84-108.
- Naylor, Gloria. "Love and Sex in the Afro-American Novel." Yale Review 78 (1999): 19-31.
- Oates, Joyce Carol. "Tragic Mulatta." Uncensored: Views & (Re)views. New York: Ecco, 2005.
- "Clotel is an American fairy tale in which royal-blooded Cinderella isn't claimed by her royal destiny but ‘deposited' into a beggar's grave" (252). Oates' review of Brown's novel focuses heavily on the archetype of the tragic mulatto, who, in her estimation, does not enjoy the alleged benefits of mixed-ancestry. In other words, Oates argues that though light skin is supposed to grant certain freedoms, more often than not mulattos lead lives plagued by the struggle to discover their identities and claim roots in one race or another.
- Palumbo-DeSimone, Christine. "Race, Womanhood, and the Tragic Mulatta." Multiculturalism: Roots and Realities. Ed. C. James Trotman. Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 2002. 125-36.
- Raimon, Eve Allegra. The "Tragic Mulatto" Revisited: Race and Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century Antislavery Fiction. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 2004.
- Raimon looks "closely at the significance of Brown's having at once, in essence, stolen [Lydia Maria] Child's story, and, at the same time, built upon it a complex overlay of historical material—imaginative and documentary combined—that finally challenges U.S. readers' conceptions of American nationalism itself and the ‘naturalness' of identity at work at the moment of their nation's very origin" (66).
- Reid-Pharr, Robert. Conjugal Union: The Body, the House, and the Black American. New York: Oxford UP, 1999.
- Schell, Jennifer. "'This Life Is a Stage': Performing the South in William Wells Brown's Clotel or, the President's Daughter." Southern Quarterly 45.3 (2008 ): 48-69.
- Schweninger, Lee. "Clotel and the Historicity of the Anecdote." Melus 24.1 (1999): 21-36.
- Schweninger analyzes Brown's use of anecdote as a means of authenticating his novel. The tale, predicated upon rumors of Jefferson's slave children, came under attack for its historical inconsistencies and overall lack of evidence. Thus, Schweninger sets out to prove that the anecdotal technique employed by Brown actually bolsters and authenticates the narrative of the mulatto daughters "in a way mere quotation of documents cannot" (24).
- Sengupta, Ashis. "William Wells Brown's Clotel: A Critique of Slave Life in America." Indian Views on American Literature. Ed. A. A. Mutalik-Desai. New Delhi: Prestige, 1998.
- Simmons, Ryan. "Naming Names: Clotel and Behind the Scenes." CLA Journal 43.1 (1999): 19-37.
- Sollors, Werner. "A British Mercenary and American Abolitionists: Literary Retellings from ‘Inkle and Yarico' and John Gabriel Stedman to Lydia Maria Child and William Wells Brown." (Trans)Formations of Cultural Identity in the English-Speaking World. Ed. Jochen Achilles and Carmen Bickle. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag C. Winter, 1998. 95-123.
- Yellin, Jean Fagan. "William Wells Brown." The Intricate Knot: Black Figures in American Literature, 1776-1863. New York: New York UP, 1972.
