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Print Price: $15.95

Format:
Paperback
272 pp.
129 mm x 196 mm

ISBN-13:
9780198707523

Publication date:
December 2017

Imprint: OUP UK

The Interesting Narrative

Olaudah Equiano
Edited by Brycchan Carey

Series : Oxford World's Classics

'I hope the slave trade may be abolished. I pray it may be an event at hand.'

Published a few days before the British parliament first debated the abolition of the slave trade in 1789, Olaudah Equiano's Interesting Narrative gives the author's account of his enslavement after his childhood kidnapping in Africa, and his journey from slavery to freedom. Equiano was slave to a captain in the Royal Navy, and later to a Quaker merchant, and he vividly depicts the appalling treatment of enslaved people at sea and on land. He takes part in naval engagements, is shipwrecked, and has other exciting adventures on his travels to the Caribbean, America, and the Arctic.

Equiano claimed his own freedom and became an important abolitionist, but his Narrative is much more than merely a political pamphlet. The most important African autobiography of the eighteenth century, it has achieved an increasingly central position among the century's great works of literature.

The introduction to this edition surveys recent debates about Equiano's birthplace and identity, and considers his campaigning role and literary achievements.

Readership : Those interested in the history of slavery and in autobiography, students of eighteenth-century literature, eighteenth-century history and politics, Caribbean literature, colonial and postcolonial literature, African literature, American studies, Black writing, travel writing, life-writing.

There is no Table of Contents available at this time.

There are no Instructor/Student Resources available at this time.

Brycchan Carey is an expert in the cultural history of slavery and its abolition. He is the author of From Peace to Freedom: Quaker Rhetoric and the Birth of American Antislavery, 1658-1761 (Yale UP, 2012), and British Abolitionism and the Rhetoric of Sensibility: Writing, Sentiment, and Slavery, 1760-1807 (Palgrave, 2005). His most recent collection, Quakers and Abolition, co-edited with Geoffrey Plank, was published by the University of Illinois Press in 2014.

Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave - Frederick Douglass
Edited with an introduction by Deborah E. McDowell
Up from Slavery - Booker T. Washington
Edited with an introduction by William L. Andrews
Uncle Tom's Cabin - Harriet Beecher Stowe
Edited with an introduction and notes by Jean Fagan Yellin

Special Features

A new edition of one of the most celebrated slave narratives, written by a former slave who went on to become a leading figure in the British abolitionist movement.
Equiano's personal account of the horrors of slavery is also an exciting adventure story of his travels on the high seas, and as an explorer and merchant in the Caribbean, the Arctic, and America.
Uses the lively 1789 first edition text.
Brycchan Carey's introduction surveys Equiano's role in the abolition debate, the book's style and structure, recent debates about Equiano's birthplace and identity, and the book's increasingly central position among the great works of eighteenth-century literature.
Includes explanatory notes, a glossary of unfamiliar terms, and a gazetteer of places mentioned.