Phillis Wheatley

In a time period heavily guided by the contrast of thought and reason to emotion and feeling, Phillis Wheatley, author of Thoughts on the Works of Providence that was published in the late eighteenth century, employs a genre of sentimentality that would be model for writers to come. From the late seventeenth century to the early nineteenth century, the Enlightenment Period guided life, specifically written works, with reason and sensibility in Europe. However, the mid-eighteenth century was a…

time. Two exceptional authors, Phillis Wheatley and Anne Bradstreet, proved to their patriarchal society that any woman, despite their race or color, can overcome their struggles in life as long as they were aligned with a belief system and stayed true to their mission on Earth. Christianity provided a means for both authors to express their creativity and emerge as published writers who were able to use religion as the driving force of their literary success. Wheatley and Bradstreet maintained…

need to end slavery. Phillis Wheatley’s poem On Being Brought from Africa to America and Thomas Gray’s novel The Confessions of Nat Turner both show how two African Americans, influenced by religion, attempted to draw attention to the injustices of slavery, Wheatley’s poem uses an indirect and more diplomatic approach.…

hard to make comparisons. To His Excellency, General Washington by Phillis Wheatley, and On the Pulse of Morning by Maya Angelou seem like completely different poems on the surface. However, when you look a little closer at themes, characterization, and personification the similarities may become a little more obvious. Hope is a central theme in both To His Excellency, General Washington and On the Pulse of Morning. Phillis Wheatley describes how other nations have hope that America will become…

to expand the mind with action did not exist” (44). Additionally, Walker speaks of a young, creatively inclined slave girl from the 1700s by the name of Phillis Wheatley, whose poetic abilities were “…so thwarted and hindered by…contrary instincts, that she …lost her health…” (46). She goes on to explain that as a slave in America, Phillis Wheatley struggled with the yearning to express herself creatively whilst living an impoverished life that forced her to work so hard; her health eventually…

The works of Phillis Wheatley often displays restrained emotion to her personal situation of enslavement. In her letter To His Excellency, George Washington, Wheatley uses classical Greek mythology such as the muses and aspects of ancient history to create allusions as she goes about her thoughts on slavery. This showcases her intelligence and learning when she calls upon the “Celestial Choir! Enthroned in realms of light, Columbia’s scenes of glorious toils I write” (Wheatley 362) as a…

Phillis Wheatley recognized that white people justified their immoral actions by arguing that they’re saving their slaves by converting them to Christianity. Wheatley decided to take her observations and turn it into the poem, “On Being Brought from Africa to America”. In this poem, the speaker is an educated slave who uses diction to mock and accuse highly educated Americans by pretending that she agrees with her target audience’s viewpoints. Wheatley develops the themes of slave conversion and…

Autobiographic or personal writing’s The narratives by Mary Rowlandson, Sarah Kemble Knight, and Olaudah Equiano are all autobiographic or personal stories that have been the landmarks of the early American literature. Both Rowlandson's Narrative and Knight's Journal track the solitary encounters of real puritan women who move past their familiar place in the pioneer property. Although the fortuitous distinction between Rowlandson's and Knight's goes from which their accounts were created, the…

theme that both fiction and non-fiction works have is their obsession with is the parent to child relationship of Britain to America. The hope and drive for freedom from Britain encouraged, symbolized, and fought for throughout Benjamin Franklin, Phillis Wheatley, Washington Irving, and Nathanial Hawthorne’s works. Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography expanded over a period of nineteen years starting in 1771. He accounts for how high esteem he holds his father “He had an excellent Constitution of…

The novel is based on the author's life, she goes into detail about her sexual exploitation, her time spent in hiding in a tiny crawlspace above the ceiling of her grandmother's shed for seven years and eventually her escape. Similarly to Phillis Wheatley, Harriet Jacobs also needed someone to vouch for her before publishing her book. It was her activist friend Lydia Maria Child who wrote a preface to her novel and only then was it published by the “Thayer and Eldridge” publishing house in 1861…