Slave Narrative

Catalog description

The slave narrative is one of the most important genres of American literature. First-person accounts by enslaved African Americans profoundly shaped international views of slavery in the early to mid-19th century. Although Western slavery has been represented in art and literature since it began, it is only fairly recently that the genre of the slave narrative has migrated into visual forms: photography, film, and the graphic novel. These attempts to re-envision the slave narrative pick up on the genre's own tendency toward revision.