Antebellum Slave Narrative Summary

Since the emancipation of slavery, former slaves, and occasionally non-slave abolitionists, have written or orated their accounts of living under America’s “peculiar institution.” These accounts were christened Slave Narratives and soon became a genre within themselves. The Handbook of African American Literature by Hazel Arnett Ervin defines the slave narrative as “A subgenre of the African American autobiography, written by forer slaves, starting as early as 1760. Major themes are the inhumanity of the slave system—as experienced by the authors of the narratives—and antislavery activism” (124). According to Phillip Gould: “Early black writers were sensitive to the terms of contemporary proslavery and antislavery dates. While lacking the rhetorical sophistication of later writers like Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs, this early writing nevertheless skillfully deploys basic Enlightenment ideas about the nature of rights and individual identity” (93). …show more content…
Then, after the height of the civil rights movement, there was a quest to expose America’s dark history with slavery. Ashraf H. A. Rushdy writes in his book, Neo-slave Narratives: Studies in the Social Logic of a Literary Form, “there occurred a distinct shift in both the current social movements and in the intellectual trends in the American historical profession, signaled by the emergence of the Black Power movement and the rise of the New Left social history” (4). Rushdy relates this shift back to literature by discussing William Styron’s novel The Confessions of Nat Turner and relates the reasons why many found it to