Surprizing Narrative: Olaudah Equiano and the Beginnings of Black Autobiography

(Hardback)

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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.

Reviews

In its emphasis on the development of the slave narrative as a unique literary genre, Costanzo's Surprizing Narrative joins Frances Smith Foster's Witnessing Slavery and William Andrews's To Tell a Free Story one of the most recent additions to scholarship about this popular literary form. It differs from these studies, however, in its specific emphais on the 18th-century origins of black autobiography. Costanzo's argument is lucid and straightforward: these narratives provided the models for subsequent developments in the genre, and he devotes his study to a careful analysis of both the themes and styles of these pioneering works. Although Costanzo's primary focus is the narrative of Olaudah Equiano, he also gives some attention to less-well-known writers in the genre: Ottobah Cugoano, Britton Hammon, and John Marrant. Well written and carefully researched, Surprizing Narrative is a good introduction to an important area of literary study. Recommended for academic and public library collections of Afro-American literature.-Choice
"In its emphasis on the development of the slave narrative as a unique literary genre, Costanzo's Surprizing Narrative joins Frances Smith Foster's Witnessing Slavery and William Andrews's To Tell a Free Story one of the most recent additions to scholarship about this popular literary form. It differs from these studies, however, in its specific emphais on the 18th-century origins of black autobiography. Costanzo's argument is lucid and straightforward: these narratives provided the models for subsequent developments in the genre, and he devotes his study to a careful analysis of both the themes and styles of these pioneering works. Although Costanzo's primary focus is the narrative of Olaudah Equiano, he also gives some attention to less-well-known writers in the genre: Ottobah Cugoano, Britton Hammon, and John Marrant. Well written and carefully researched, Surprizing Narrative is a good introduction to an important area of literary study. Recommended for academic and public library collections of Afro-American literature."-Choice

Author Bio

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