Product Description: With Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773), Phillis Wheatley (1753?–1784) became the first English-speaking person of African descent to publish a book and only the second woman―of any race or background― to do so in America...read more

Product Description: Book by Darcy, Emma

This definitive biography tells the story of the former slave Olaudah Equiano (1745?-97), who in his day was the English-speaking world's most renowned person of African descent. Reprint. 17,500 first printing.

In Unchained Voices, Vincent Carretta has assembled the most comprehensive anthology ever published of writings by eighteenth-century people of African descent, enabling many of these authors to be heard clearly for the first time in two centuries. Their writings reflect the surprisingly diverse experiences of blacks on both sides of the Atlantic-America, Britain, the West Indies, and Africa - between 1760 and 1798. Letters, poems, captivity narratives, petitions, criminal autobiographies, economic treatises, travel accounts, and antislavery arguments were produced during a time of various and changing political and religious loyalties. Although the theme of liberation from physical or spiritual captivity runs throughout the collection, freedom also clearly led to hardship and disappointment for a number of these authors. In his introduction, Carretta reconstructs the historical and cultural context of the works, emphasizing the constraints of the eighteenth-century genres under which these authors wrote. The texts and annotations are based on extensive research in both published and manuscript holdings of archives in the United States and the United Kingdom. Appropriate for undergraduates as well as for scholars, Unchained Voices gives a clear sense of the major literary and cultural issues at the heart of writings in English by people of African descent.

A collection of writings by the eighteenth-century slave and author includes her letters, poetry, short fiction, and essays, along with poetry by such contemporary African American poets as Lucy Terry, Jupiter Harmon, and Francis Williams.

Relates the experiences of an African prince who was kidnapped into slavery in 1755 and followed his various masters from the Americas to Europe and through the Caribbean.

Product Description: Until fairly recently, critical studies and anthologies of African American literature generally began with the 1830s and 1840s. Yet there was an active and lively transatlantic black literary tradition as early as the 1760s. Genius in Bondage situates this literature in its own historical terms, rather than treating it as a sort of prologue to later African American writings...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

A definitive collection of writings by the eighteenth-century American slave and author includes her letters, poetry, translations, short fiction, and essays, along with poetry by some of Wheatley's contemporary African-American poets--Lucy Terry, Jupiter Harmon, and Francis Williams. Original. (view table of contents)

After working as a slave in the West Indies in the 1700s and then being freed in England, Cugoano wrote this work, which refutes pro-slavery arguments of the day and asserts that all slaves have a moral obligation to rebel. (view table of contents)

Product Description: Examines the "golden age" of English political satire, during the ministry of Sir Robert Walpole, in light of the unique relationship that was developing at the time between literary and graphic political satire.