![]() ![]() After slavery was abolished in NorthĪmerica in 1865, at least fifty former slaves wrote or dictated book-length accounts of their lives. From 1760 to the end of the Civil War in the United States, approximately one hundred autobiographies of fugitive or former slaves appeared. African-born Muslims who wrote in Arabic, the Cuban poet Juan Francisco Manzano, and a handful white American sailors taken captive by North African pirates also penned narratives of their enslavement during the nineteenth century. Offering a diversity of voices, slave narratives represent an influential tradition in American literature. Although the vast majority of American slave narratives were authored by people of African descent, Slave narratives comprise one of the most influential traditions inĪmerican literature, shaping the form and themes of some of the most celebrated and controversial writing, in both autobiography and fiction, Under the general rubric of slave narrative falls any account of the life, or a major portion of the life, of a fugitive or former slave,Įither written or orally related by the slave himself or herself. Historical Overview of an American Tradition ![]() University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Jazz and the African American Literature Traditionįreedom’s Story is made possible by a grant from the Wachovia Foundation.The Image of Africa in the Literature of the Harlem Renaissance.The New Negro and the Black Image: From Booker T. ![]()
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