Slave Narritive

Yu Shi

AAAS 154: Introduction to African American Literature

Research Paper

May 26, 2011

Style and Form in

Harriet Jacob’s

Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl

Background of African American Slave Narrative

The Atlantic slave trade has brought close to two million slaves from Africa and the West Indies to the American south. During that period approximately 20% of the population of the American South has been African American, and as late as 1900, 9 out of every 10 African Americans lived in the South. And before the civil war, countless slaves tried to escape from the south to reach freedom in the north. The slave narrative has become a crucial genre within African American literary studies and an invaluable record of the experience and history of slavery in the United States. As historical sources, slave narratives document slave life primarily in the American South from the invaluable perspective of first-hand experience. Increasingly in the 1840s and 1850s they reveal the struggles of people of color in the North, as fugitives from the South recorded the disparities between America's ideal of freedom and the reality of racism in the so-called "free states."

Some of the classic texts of American literature, including the two most influential nineteenth-century American novels, Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) and Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn (1884), and such prize-winning contemporary novels as William Styron's The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967), and Toni Morrison's Beloved (1987), bear the direct influence of the slave narrative. Some of the most important revisionist scholarship in the historical study of American slavery in the last forty years has marshaled the slave narratives as key testimony. Slave narratives and their fictional descendants have played a major role in national debates about slavery, freedom, and American...