This innovative book focuses specifically on Douglass' Atlantic encounters, literal and literary, against the backdrop of slavery, emancipation, and western colonial processes. Yet much of his literary and political development occurred outside the United States. Much critical attention has been placed on Douglass activities within the United States, his effect on political reform, and struggle for emancipation. The most prolific African American writer of the nineteenth century embarked, after his escape from slavery in 1838, on a public career that would span the century and three continents. This paper will focus on the analysis of the "Narrative" of Frederick Douglass as both a vehicle for the search of freedom and the search of identity, providing an explanation on how Douglass is able to define his “self.”įrederick Douglass and the Atlantic World explores how his relationship with Ireland, Haiti, Egypt affected Frederick Douglass' writing, national, class and racial identity, and his activism. For this reason, one of the slave narratives’ ultimate purposes is to convince the reader that slavery had to be denounced and abolished at once. In addition, slave narratives – as in the case of Douglass’ Narrative – focus on the human sides of slaves, providing a way to recuperate their own identity in the daily and terrible reality of slavery. Written in first-person narrator, slave narratives show the everlasting challenge produced by the dichotomy freedom-slavery. In general, slave narratives represent a literary corpus that was greatly popular in the 19th century America. It is considered one of the most important slave narratives released before the Civil War. In 1845, he published – at the Anti-Slavery Office in Boston – his well-known work, "Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, Written By Himself". He was a slave, a writer, orator, editor, activist and social reformer, and an abolitionist leader. Frederick Douglass (~1818-1895) was one of the most famous African American of the 19th century.
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