THE DEVELOPMENT OF SLAVE NARRATIVES IN AMERICAN LITERATURE AND THEIR FEATURES
Keywords:
slave narrative, literature, African American writing, abolitionism, freedom, identity, resistance.Abstract
Slave narratives belong to the handful of books that have reshaped literature. Not did they help carve out the meaning of American identity they also set an international template, for articulating human rights. The first of these narratives surfaced in the 1700s and 1800s largely authored by African Americans who had fled slavery. Their mission was plain: to expose the truth of slavery and in their own words to prove they were fully human. This article unfurls how these personal narratives have swollen across the years. It launches with autobiographical sketches most notably “The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano” and then sails toward the heavyweight tomes that still echo on modern shelves: “Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass” and “Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl”, by Harriet Jacobs.
References
Andrews, William L. To Tell a Free Story: The First Century of Afro-American Autobiography, 1760–1865. University of Illinois Press, 1986.
Blight, David W. Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom. Simon & Schuster / Yale University Press (editions vary), 2018.
Douglass, Frederick. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave. Anti-Slavery Office, Boston, 1845. Electronic edition.
Equiano, Olaudah. The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African. 1789.
Foster, Frances Smith. Witnessing Slavery: The Development of Ante-bellum Slave Narratives. Greenwood Press, 1979; Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1994 (reprint).
Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism. Oxford University Press, 1988.
Jacobs, Harriet A. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself. Edited by Jean Fagan Yellin, Harvard University Press (The John Harvard Library), 1987 (reissues 2009).
