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
"In a work of impressive scope, Hutchins takes on the challenging task of delineating the prehistory of the slave narrative and how slavery was understood in the American colonies, while also helping readers understand the role of newspapers in both the development of and resistance to slavery as an institution."—Karen Weyler, University of North Carolina at Greensboro