The historical and literary importance that slave narratives—the autobiographical accounts written by formerly enslaved people in the United States and throughout the Atlantic world in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—wielded in their own time and continue to wield in ours is difficult to overstate. Popular and widely read on both sides of the Atlantic, slave narratives played an indispensable role in the campaigns against slavery in Britain and the United States and in the development of a black literary tradition, and they continue to be widely read and to shape popular...
The historical and literary importance that slave narratives—the autobiographical accounts written by formerly enslaved people in the United States ...
