Includes bibliographical references (p. 191-199) and index.
Contents:
Introduction: bearing witness: memory, theatricality, the body, and slave testimony -- Abolitionist discourse: a transatlantic context; Abolitionist discourse and romanticism ; Reflections on abolitionist discourse in England ; Reflections on abolitionist discourse in the U.S. -- "I know what a slave knows": Mary Prince as witness, or the rhetorical uses of experience -- Appropriating the word: Phillis Wheatley, religious, rhetoric, and the poetics of liberation -- Speaking as "the African": Olaudah Equiano's Moral argument against slavery -- Consider the audience: witnessing to the discursive reader in Douglass's Narrative.
Summary:
Black literary production during the 19th century was dominated by the issues of slavery, racial subjugation, abolitionist politics and liberation. This book examines how those authors bore witness to the experiences they described.
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