Surprizing Narrative: Olaudah Equiano and the Beginnings of Black Autobiography

This book skillfully examines the many literary devices utilized by the first black writers as they related their slave experiences and fashioned for their own use such literary techniques as the jeremiad sermonic form, the trustworthy omniscient narrator, the picaresque character, the Biblical typological hero, the strong speaking voice, and the quest for physical and spiritual freedoms. The primary object of study is Olaudah Equiano’s brilliant autobiography, which served as a prototype for later slave narratives, and thus provided a background for the development of a literary pattern followed by succeeding generations of American black writers. The autobiographical form as used by the eighteenth-century black writers is explored as a reflection of black perceptions of Western culture, and their attempt to enter the literary world.