CRITICISM

Anstey, Roger. “Anti-Slavery Values in Literature.” In The Atlantic Slave Trade and British Abolition 1760-1810, pp. 142-53. Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1975.

Argues that British nineteenth-century religious zeal to abolish slavery had its roots in the eighteenth-century ideals of liberty, benevolence, and the noble savage.

Coleman, Deidre. “Sierra Leone, Slavery, and Sexual Politics: Anna Maria Falconbridge and the ‘Swarthy Daughter’ of Late 18th Century Abolitionism.” Women's Writing 2, no. 1 (1995): 3-23.

Explores connections between race and gender in Anna Maria Falconbridge's 1794 antislavery travel narrative, Two Voyages to Sierra Leone.

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. Review of Clarkston's The History of the Abolition of the Slave Trade. Edinburgh Review 12, no. 24 (July 1808): 355-79.

Provides a favorable review of Thomas Clarkson's influential 1808 abolitionist text.

Craton, Michael, James Walvin, and David Wright. “Anti-Slavery: The Intellectual Origins.” In Slavery, Abolition and Emancipation: Black Slaves and the British Empire, pp. 195-99. London: Longman, 1976.

Traces the late-eighteenth-century intellectual roots of British abolitionism, giving special mention to Montesquieu's De L'Esprit des Lois, William Paley's Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy, Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations, and John Wesley's Thoughts upon Slavery.

Davis, David Brion. “Part III.” In The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture, pp. 291-494. Ithaca, N. Y.: Cornell University Press, 1966.

Concludes a three-part study of slavery in the West that discusses the roles that religion and Enlightenment thought had in the rise of antislavery sentiment, as seen in philosophical, political, and literary works.

———. The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution. Ithaca, N. Y.: Cornell University Press, 1975, 576 p.

Provides a comparative analysis of the economic, political, and religious forces that contributed to antislavery sentiment in England and the United States from 1770 to 1823.

De Paolo, Charles S. “Of Tribes and Hordes: Coleridge and the Emancipation of the Slaves, 1808.” Theoria 60 (May 1983): 27-43.

Discusses Coleridge's 1808 stance on British slavery, one that advocated manumission while simultaneously recommending that former slaves be prepared for freedom through forced relocation to West Africa.

Dykes, Eva Beatrice. The Negro in English Romantic Thought, or, A Study of Sympathy for the Oppressed. Washington, D.C.: Associated Publishers, 1942, 197 p.

Studies sympathetic portrayals of Blacks in English eighteenth- and nineteenth-century poetry and prose; includes chapters on famous, obscure, and female British Romantic abolitionist writers.

Favret, Mary A. “Flogging: The Anti-Slavery Movement Writes Pornography.” Essays and Studies 51 (1998): 19-43.

Discusses the relationship between abolitionism and pornography in Romantic antislavery poetry, prose, and art that depicted violent and often erotically charged floggings of half-naked slave women.

Klingberg, Frank Joseph. “The Formation of Public Opinion in Great Britain against Slavery and the Slave Trade,” “The New Determinant: Humanitarianism,” “Emancipation of the Slaves in Great Britain,” and “The Attack on the Slave Trade 1783-1793. Aggressive Humanitarianism.” In The Anti-Slavery Movement in England: A Study in English Humanitarianism, pp. 22-96. North Haven, Conn.: Archon Books, 1926.

Provides an historical and literary overview of changes in attitude toward slavery in England during the eighteenth century, a trend which made abolitionism the major humanitarian reform movement by the final decades of the century.

McCoubrey, John. “Turner's Slave Ship: Abolition, Ruskin, and Reception.” Word & Image 14, no. 4 (October-December 1998): 319-53.

Argues that J. M. W. Turner's 1812 painting The Slave Ship profoundly influenced abolitionist literature and art in Britain and the United States.

Paton, Diana. “Decency, Dependence and the Lash: Gender and the British Debate over Slave Emancipation, 1830-34.” Slavery and Abolition 17, no. 3 (1996): 163-84.

Argues that British abolitionist ideology in the early 1830s worked to exclude female slaves from consideration in debates about how labor would be organized after emancipation.

Sypher, Wylie. Guinea's Captive Kings: British Anti-Slavery Literature of the XVIIIth Century. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1942, 340 p.

Provides an overview of British eighteenth-century abolitionist poetry, drama, legend, and fiction.

Thomas, Helen. Romanticism and Slave Narratives: Transatlantic Testimonies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000, 332 p.

Examines Romantic abolitionist culture and literature in Britain and America from 1770 to 1830, with detailed analysis of how the writings of ex-slaves differed in their perspective and emphases from abolitionist writings of white authors.