The Cambridge Companion to Slavery in American Literature Cambridge Companions to Literature Series

The Cambridge Companion to Slavery in American Literature brings together leading scholars to examine the significance of slavery in American literature from the eighteenth century to the present day. In addition to stressing how central slavery has been to the study of American culture, this Companion provides students with a broad introduction to an impressive range of authors including Olaudah Equiano, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Beecher Stowe and Toni Morrison. Accessible to students and academics alike, this Companion surveys the critical landscape of a major field and lays the foundations for future studies.

Introduction Ezra Tawil; 1. Slavery in the eighteenth-century literary imagination Philip Gould; 2. US antislavery tracts and the literary imagination Teresa A. Goddu; 3. White slaves in the late-eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American literary imagination Joe Shapiro; 4. Slave narratives as literature Sarah Meer; 5. Slavery and the emergence of the African American novel John C. Havard; 6. Proslavery fiction Gavin Jones and Judith Richardson; 7. The poetry of slavery Meredith L. McGill; 8. Reading slavery and 'classic' American literature Robert S. Levine; 9. Slavery's performance-texts Douglas A. Jones, Jr; 10. The music and the musical inheritance of slavery Radiclani Clytus; 11. US slave revolutions in Atlantic world literature Paul Giles; 12. Slavery and American literature 1900–45 Tim Armstrong; 13. Moving pictures: spectacles of enslavement in American cinema Sharon Willis; 14. Slavery and historical memory in late-twentieth-century fiction Ashraf H. A. Rushdy; 15. Beyond the borders of the neo-slave narrative: science fiction and fantasy Jeffrey Allen Tucker.

Ezra Tawil is Associate Professor of English at the University of Rochester, New York. He is the author of The Making of Racial Sentiment: Slavery and the Birth of the Frontier Romance (Cambridge, 2006) and of numerous essays in such journals as Novel, Early American Literature, and Diaspora. He is currently completing a book entitled The American Style: Literary Exceptionalism and Transatlantic Culture.