Surprizing Narrative: Olaudah Equiano and the Beginnings of Black Autobiography / Edition 1

by Angelo Costanzo

Overview

This book skillfully examines the many literary devices utilized by the first black writers as they related their slave experiences and fashioned for their own use such literary techniques as the jeremiad sermonic form, the trustworthy omniscient narrator, the picaresque character, the Biblical typological hero, the strong speaking voice, and the quest for physical and spiritual freedoms. The primary object of study is Olaudah Equiano's brilliant autobiography, which served as a prototype for later slave narratives, and thus provided a background for the development of a literary pattern followed by succeeding generations of American black writers. The autobiographical form as used by the eighteenth-century black writers is explored as a reflection of black perceptions of Western culture, and their attempt to enter the literary world.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780313256332
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Academic
Publication date:	05/14/1987
Series:	Contributions in Afro-American and African Studies: Contemporary Black Poets , #10
Pages:	156
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.44(d)

About the Author

ANGELO COSTANZO is Professor of English at Shippensburg University, Pennsylvania.

Table of Contents

Series Foreword
Early Black Autobiography
Methods, Elements, and Effects of Black Autobiography
Ottobah Cugoano
The Spiritual Autobiography and Slave Narrative of Olaudah Equiano
Black Autobiographers as Biblical Types
Later Black Autobiography
Notes
Bibliography
Index