CRITICISM

Conolly, L. W. “English Drama and the Slave Trade.” English Studies in Canada 4 (1978): 393-412.

Survey of English plays about slavery in the 1700s and the early 1800s.

Diedrich, Maria, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Carl Pederson, eds.. Black Imagination and the Middle Passage. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999, 320 p.

Collection of essays examining the forced dispossession of Africans caused by slavery and the slave trade; analyzes the texts, religious rites, economic exchanges, dance, and music of the transatlantic journey and on the American continent.

Ebbatson, J. R. “Some ‘Forgotten Scribblers’ on the Slave Trade.” Ariel: A Review of International English Literature 4, No. 4 (1973): 3-18.

Discusses the work of lesser-known eighteenth-century British writers who contributed to the slavery debate, such as Richard Mant, Elizabeth Berger, and William Dodd.

Ellis, Markman. “Sentimentalism and the Problem of Slavery.” In The Politics of Sensibility, pp. 49-86. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.

Discusses the references to and “theme” of slavery in eighteenth-century British sentimental literature by Laurence Sterne and compares it to the treatment of slavery in the works by ex-slave Ignatius Sancho. Ellis concludes that the sentimental approach, despite its humanitarian and benevolent intentions, failed to move beyond the depiction of its theme to a critique of the theme's subject—the actual existence of slavery and its effect on enslaved peoples.

Gardner, Jared. Master Plots: Race and the Founding of an American Literature, 1787-1845. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998, 238 p.

Examination of the intersection of racial and national discourses in the founding of a national literature in the United States. Includes a chapter on Royall Tyler's The Algerian Captive.

Gwilliam, Tassie. “‘Scenes of Horror,’ Scenes of Sensibility: Sentimentality and Slavery in John Gabriel Stedman's Narrative of a Five Years Expedition against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam.” ELH 65, No. 3 (1998): 653-73.

Argues that John Gabriel Stedman's Narrative (1790) demonstrates that slavery and colonialism can serve to illuminate the contradictions and internal pressures endemic to sentimental love plots and the problematic process of creating sentimentality itself.

Hudson, Nicholas. “From ‘Nation’ to ‘Race’: The Origin of Racial Classification in Eighteenth-Century Thought.” Eighteenth-Century Studies 29, No. 3 (1996): 247-64

Discussion of the central development in the history of racial classification—the changing meaning of the term “race,” along with the associated terms “nation” and “tribe,” from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment.

Morrison, Anthea. “Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Greek Prize Ode on the Slave Trade.” In An Infinite Complexity: Essays in Romanticism, edited by J. R. Watson. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1983, 248 p.

Critical examination of Coleridge's “Ode on the Slave Trade.”

Pederson, Carl. “Middle Passages: Representations of the Slave Trade in Caribbean and African-American Literature.” Massachusetts Review 34, No. 2 (Summer 1993): 225-38.

Explores the works of five authors, from the 1700s to the 1990s, who have written about the Middle Passage from Africa to the Americas. Includes a discussion of the work of Olaudah Equiano.

Plasa, Carl and Betty J. Ring. The Discourse of Slavery: Aphra Behn to Toni Morrison. London: Routledge, 1994, 226 p.

Collection of essays that address the problematic of slavery within the literary, cultural, and political discourses of Britain and the United States from the seventeenth century to the late twentieth century.

Potkay, Adam and Sandra Burr, eds. Black Atlantic Writers of the 18th Century: Living the Exodus in England and the Americas. New York: St Martin's Press, 1995, 268 p.

Collection focusing on the works of Ukawsaw Gronniosaw, John Marrant, Ottobah Cugoano, and Olaudah Equiano that seeks to uncover the various contexts necessary for understanding the stories of the writers' lives.

Ransom, Stanley Austin, Jr., ed. America's First Negro Poet: The Complete Works of Jupitor Hammon of Long Island. Port Washington, N. Y.: Kennikat Press, 1970, 122 p.

Includes a biographical sketch of Hammon, a bibliography of his works, and commentary on his poetry and prose.

Rees, Christine. “Utopia Overseas.” In Utopian Imagination and Eighteenth-Century Fiction, pp. 76-94. London: Longman Group, 1996.

Discusses the attitudes towards slavery of Daniel Defoe's protagonist in Robinson Crusoe and considers whether the character Friday was a slave not only by modern standards but according to theories posited by thinkers from Aristotle to John Locke.

Sandiford, Keith A. Measuring the Moment: Strategies of Protest in Eighteenth-Century Afro-English Writing. London: Associated University Presses, 1988, 181 p.

Examination of the significant impact of the African writers Ottobah Cugoano, Ignatius Sancho, and Olaudah Equiano on public conscience and the anti-slavery movement England.

Seeber, Edward D. “Anti-Slavery Opinion in the Poems of Some Early French Followers of James Thomson.” Modern Language Notes 50, No. 7 (November 1935): 427-34.

Reviews the works of several French poets who were influenced by British poet James Thomson, who protested against slavery, and who contributed to the growth of abolitionist sentiment.

Spengemann, William C. “The Earliest American Novel: Aphra Behn's Oronooko.” Nineteenth-Century Fiction 38, No. 4 (March 1984): 384-414.

Contends that Oronooko should be considered an early American novel and that it has not been because of the novel's setting.

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.

Important early study of slavery and English literature. Sypher argues that representations of slavery in the early seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were not primarily interested in the condition of chattel slavery.

Thomas, Hugh. The Slave Trade: The Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1440-1870. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997, 908 p.

Comprehensive historical study of the Atlantic slave trade told largely from the perspective of white participants, from the time of the first Portugese slaving expeditions to the era after the Emancipation Proclamation. Includes brief discussions of the literature of the era.

Tokson, Elliot H. The Popular Image of the Black Man in English Drama, 1550-1668. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1982, 178 p.

Studies the ways that English creative writers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries treated the black Africans who had been introduced into their culture in the 1550s.

Wheeler, Roxann. “‘My Savage,’ ‘My Man’: Racial Multiplicity in Robinson Crusoe.” ELH 62, No. 4 (1995): 821-61.

Examines the representation of race in Robinson Crusoe and maintains that the difficulty of situating the character Friday in any stable category of cannibal or slave is central to analyzing the novel and reflects the cultural uncertainty about the significance of racial difference in the eighteenth century.

———. “The Complexion of Desire: Racial Ideology and Mid-Eighteenth-Century British Novels.” Eighteenth-Century Studies 32, No. 3 (1999): 309-32.

Explores the understanding of difference and desire in eighteenth-century novels that feature racial intermarriage.