Discourses of Slavery and Abolition brings together for the first time the most important strands of current thinking on the relationship between slavery and categories of writing, oratory and visual culture in the 'long' Eighteenth-century. The book begins by examining writing about slavery and race by both philosophers and by authors such as Aphra Behn. It considers self-representation in the works of Ignatius Sancho, Olaudah Equiano, James Williams and Mary Prince. The final section reads literary and cultural texts associated with the abolition movements of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth centuries, moving beyond traditional accounts of the documents of that movement to show the importance of religious writing, children's literature and the relationship between art and abolition.
List of Illustrations Acknowledgements Notes on Contributors Introduction; B.Carey & S.Salih PART I: DISCOURSES OF SLAVERY 'Candid Reflections': The Idea of Race in the Debate over the Slave Trade and Slavery in the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Century; P.Kitson Abolishing Romance: Representing Rape in Oroonoko ; S.Wiseman 'Incessant labour': Georgic Poetry and the Problem of Slavery; M.Ellis Sensibility, Tropical Disease and the Eighteenth-Century Sentimental Novel; C.Ward PART II: SLAVERY FROM WITHIN 'The hellish means of Killing and Kidnapping': Ignatius Sancho and the Campaign Against the 'abominable traffic for slaves'; B.Carey Who's Afraid of Cannibals: Some Uses of the Cannibalism Trope in Oluadah Equiano's Interesting Narrative ; M.Stein 'From His Own Lips': The Politics of Authenticity in A Narrative of Events since the First of August, 1834 by James Williams, An Apprenticed Labourer in Jamaica; D.Paton The History of Mary Prince, the Black Subject and the Black Canon; S.Salih PART III: DISCOURSES OF ABOLITION Henry Smeathman, the Fly-catching Abolitionist; D.Coleman Sentiment, Politics and Empire: A Study of Beilby Porteus's Antislavery Sermon; B.Tennant Slavery, Abolition, and the Nation in Priscilla Wakefield's Tour Books for Children ; J.M.Smith Questioning the 'Necessary Order of Things': Maria Edgeworth's 'The Grateful Negro', Plantation Slavery and the Abolition of the Slave Trade; F.R.Botkin Turner's Slave Ship , 1840: Towards a Dialectical History Painting; L.Costello Bibliography Index
