Before Equiano
A Prehistory of the North American Slave Narrative
By Zachary McLeod Hutchins
306 pp., 6.125 x 9.25, 14 halftones, 4 tables, notes, bibl., index
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Paperback ISBN: 978-1-4696-7154-3
Published: December 2022 -
Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-4696-7153-6
Published: December 2022 -
E-book EPUB ISBN: 978-1-4696-7155-0
Published: December 2022 -
E-book PDF ISBN: 979-8-8908-6234-1
Published: December 2022
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About the Author
Zachary Hutchins is associate professor of English at Colorado State University and co-editor of The Earliest African American Literatures: A Critical Reader.
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Reviews
"Hutchins makes an important contribution to the growing scholarly interest in expanding our understanding of what a published 'slave narrative' was by investigating the eighteenth-century origins of what is usually understood to be a nineteenth-century Anglo-American genre."—H-Early-America
“Scholars of the literature of slavery and, indeed, the slave narrative, have a great deal to learn from Before Equiano... With its explicit reliance on both the archive and the critic's "imaginative readings," [it] affirms the need for early Americanists to continue to think carefully about the purposes and methodologies of historicist literary criticism.” –Early American Literature
“Before Equiano . . . makes important contributions to our understanding of colonial conceptions of enslavement and highlights the significant differences between eighteenth-century views of slavery and those Americans held in the antebellum period. . . . [A] valiant effort to recover the words, the lives, and, above all, the mind-set of enslaved people engaged in influencing colonial conceptions of enslavement in the eighteenth century.”–Journal of American History
“Before Equiano, through its emphasis on the eighteenth-century periodical record, provides important context for the nineteenth-century slave narrative and for a Black life writing tradition more broadly.”— Eighteenth-Century Studies
“Before Equiano is such a beautiful achievement. It is the first comprehensive study of the rhetorical habits, historical contexts, and discursive strains of the slave narrative prior to its consecration in the antebellum era; in short, it is the story of the slave narrative before it became the slave narrative.”—American Literary History
“Before Equiano demonstrate[s] fresh ways of understanding African American literature. . . . Scholars interested in the complex history of race, slavery, and literacy in early American should save a place on their shelf for [this work].”—William & Mary Quarterly