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Slavery in literature

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Full-Text Articles in English Language and Literature

Gender, Genre And Slavery: The Other Rowson, Rowson's Others, Eileen Elrod Jan 2011

Gender, Genre And Slavery: The Other Rowson, Rowson's Others, Eileen Elrod

English

Readers familiar with Susanna Rowson as the author of Charlotte Temple (1791, 1794) do not think of her as an abolitionist. But in 1805 Rowson articulated an anti-slavery position in Universal Geography, a textbook addressed to schoolgirls such as those she herself taught at the Young Ladies Academy in Boston. Condemning those who viewed sugar and slavery as a winning equation that would make them rich, Rowson denounced the “purchase and sale of human beings,” and insisted that anyone “enlightened by reason and religion” would oppose the “horrid trade,” and see it as she did, as “a disgrace to humanity.”1 …


Moses And The Egyptian: Religious Authority In Olaudah Equiano's Iteresting Narrative, Eileen Razzari Elrod Jan 2001

Moses And The Egyptian: Religious Authority In Olaudah Equiano's Iteresting Narrative, Eileen Razzari Elrod

English

From the first image that greeted readers of his book, Olaudah Equiano presented the self of his 1789 autobiographical narrative as a pious Christian, one whose religious conversion meant a kind of freedom as significant as his manumission from slavery. In the striking frontispiece portrait Equiano sits with biblical text in hand, insisting-in his visual as in his textual presentations of himself-that the Christianity he embraces is the defining feature of his life-story. He responds, as Susan Marren has suggested, to two paradoxical imperatives: one, to write himself into creation as a speaking subject and, two, to write an antislavery …