slavery, literature of
slavery, literature of.This refers to the literature written during or about the period between the 16th and 19th cents when Europeans colonized the Americas and the Caribbean using slave labour from Africa. Slavery played an important role in the development of European thought and literature especially in the 18th cent. The anti-slavery movement, at its peak in the 1780s and 1790s, attracted many poets to its cause, including Wordsworth , Blake , Cowper , and Southey , and ‘The Dying Negro’ ( 1773 ) by Thomas Day became one of the best-known abolitionist poems of the day. Slavery became a fashionable literary topic. Two of the century's most popular plays in Britain, Southerne 's Oroonoko ( 1696 ) and Colman's Inkle and Yarico ( 1787 : one of 45 different versions of the tale that circulated through Europe), were concerned with slavery. A critique of civilization and commerce links anti-slavery with...
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