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Published in the bicentenary year of Frederick Douglass’s birth and in a Black Lives Matter era, this edition of Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass presents new research into his life as an activist and an author. A revolutionary reformer who traveled in Scotland, Ireland, England, and Wales as well as the US, Douglass…

Universally recognized today as one of the most important and influential Americans of the nineteenth century, Frederick Douglass rose to prominence in the national abolitionist movement before and during the Civil War by virtue of the vividness and power with which, drawing on his personal experiences of enslavement and freedom, he spoke and wrote against…

Only by Experience: An Anthology of Slave Narratives collects, in whole or in part, sixteen of the most significant and influential slave narratives in English. Based on material from the acclaimed Broadview Anthology of American Literature, the anthology includes works from the British Empire as well as the United States and puts classic examples of…

About the Anthology Covering American literature from its pre-contact Indigenous beginnings through the Reconstruction period, the first two volumes of The Broadview Anthology of American Literature represent a substantial reconceiving of the canon of early American literature. Guided by the latest scholarship in American literary studies, and deeply committed to inclusiveness, social responsibility, and rigorous…

About the Anthology Covering American literature from its pre-contact Indigenous beginnings through the Reconstruction period, the first two volumes of The Broadview Anthology of American Literature represent a substantial reconceiving of the canon of early American literature. Guided by the latest scholarship in American literary studies, and deeply committed to inclusiveness, social responsibility, and rigorous…

“Benito Cereno,” a story of atmospheric Gothic horror and striking political resonance, represents Herman Melville’s most profound and unsettling engagement with the horrors of New World slavery. Narrating the story of a slave revolt using materials drawn from Amasa Delano’s non-fictional account of the Tryal Rebellion from earlier in the nineteenth century, Melville’s story probes…

Black in America samples the breadth of nonfiction writing on African American experiences in the United States from the eighteenth century to the present. The anthology emphasizes twenty-first-century authors such as Ta-Nehisi Coates, Claudia Rankine, and Roxane Gay, but a substantial selection of important earlier writers—from Phillis Wheatley and Olaudah Equiano, through Sojourner Truth and…

About the Anthology Guided by the latest scholarship in American literary studies, and deeply committed to inclusiveness, social responsibility, and rigorous contextualization, The Broadview Anthology of American Literature balances representation of widely agreed-upon major works with a thoroughgoing reassessment of the canon that emphasizes American literature’s diversity, variety, breadth, and connections with the rest of…

The sentimental antislavery novel Ida May appeared so like its predecessor in the genre, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, that for the month of November 1854, reviewers looked for Harriet Beecher Stowe’s hand in the narrative. Ida May explores the “possibility” of white slavery from the safety of an exciting, romantic narrative: Ida is kidnapped on her…

One of the most powerful and provocative voices to emerge from the social and political unrest preceding the Civil War, the abolitionist and political activist Delany is today considered to have been among the earliest black nationalists. This volume offers a concise introduction to Delany’s extraordinary career: included in full is the rousing separatist oration…

The Afrofuturist plot of Pauline E. Hopkins’s Of One Blood (1902–03) weaves together a lost African city, bigamy, incest, murder, ancient prophecies, a thwarted leopard attack, racial passing, baby switching, mesmerism, and hauntings—both literal ghost hauntings and metaphoric hauntings from the sins of slavery. This Broadview Edition offers for the first time annotations and appendices…

Frances Harper’s fourth novel follows the life of the beautiful, light-skinned Iola Leroy to tell the story of black families in slavery, during the Civil War, and after Emancipation. Iola Leroy adopts and adapts three genres that commanded significant audiences in the nineteenth century: the sentimental romance, the slave narrative, and plantation fiction. Written by…

With its gripping plot and pungent dialogue, Uncle Tom’s Cabin offers readers today a passionate portrait of a nation on the verge of disunion and a surprisingly subtle examination of the relationship between race and nationalism that has always been at the heart of the American experience. This Broadview edition is based upon the first…

Uncle Tom’s Cabin may well have excited more controversy than any other work of fiction in American history. Welcomed by many abolitionists and met with indignation by supporters of slavery, it gave crucial impetus to the antislavery movement, and its characters and dramatic scenes were quickly absorbed into the nation’s consciousness; at the same time,…

As nearly all of its reviewers pointed out, Clotel was an audience-minded performance, an effort to capitalize on the post—Uncle Tom’s Cabin “mania” for abolitionist fiction in Great Britain, where William Wells Brown lived between 1849 and 1854. The novel tells the story of Clotel and Althesa, the fictional daughters of Thomas Jefferson and his…

“Is it the intention of law-makers that good men shall be hung ever?” asked Henry David Thoreau. The question has never been academic, but in 1924, when Herman Melville’s Billy Budd, Sailor was published posthumously, we understood better than ever why. An uneasy if beautiful account of the human cost of realpolitik, Billy Budd, Sailor…

Captain Harry Foster Dean’s 1929 memoir The Pedro Gorino is the extraordinary story of his time in southern Africa around the turn of the twentieth century. Dean’s narrative describes his thrilling maritime adventures and his encounters with important figures in history, but he never loses sight of his main purpose: establishing a colony where diasporic…

Unjustly overlooked in its own time, Frank J. Webb’s novel of pre-Civil War Philadelphia weaves together action, humor, and social commentary. The Garies and Their Friends tells the story of two families struggling for different sorts of respectability: the Garies, a well-to-do interracial couple who relocate to Philadelphia from the plantation South in order to…

The two narratives published together in The Tragedy of Pudd’nhead Wilson and the Comedy Those Extraordinary Twins are overflowing with spectacular events. Twain shows us conjoined twins, babies exchanged in the cradle, acts of cross-dressing and racial masquerade, duels, a lynching, and a murder mystery. Pudd’head Wilson tells the story of babies, one of mixed…