...Throughout American literature, slavery has been written about time after time. Two well known works about this topic are The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano by Olaudah Equiano and “On Being Brought from Africa to America” by Phillis Wheatley. While these works deal with the same topic of slavery, they differ in genre and time period. Equiano wrote a narrative in the Early American Fiction time period while Wheatley wrote a poem during the Revolutionary period. They both tell the tale of slave in first person perspective, but they tell two different stories. Equiano’s narrative was written in the 1750s at the end of the Early American Fiction period of American Literature. The religious theme that was common during this...
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...The Industrial Revolution was a time of great strides for this nation economically but his boom in our nation would also come at a dark price, whether you were picking cotton in the south or working at a factory the conditions were not the greatest. It is understood that if you were the picking cotton in the fields or unwillingly working for a family it was clearly not because you wanted to it. For instance, the underlining reason for being trapped in these such conditions had more of a sinister reasoning, but nonetheless we are acquainted to two very different aspects of this time in our history, at first we are introduced to a Olaudah Equiano who lived the life of a slave we see his struggles his pain and how he overcame this very...
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...The Middle Passage was a dark stage of history in which Africans were sent on vessels to America as part of the slave trade. Two particular slaves used these dreadful times to their advantage. Putting their experiences into writing, Phillis Wheatley and Olaudah Equiano wrote tremendously successful literary pieces that shaped the abolition movement. In both Equiano’s narrative and Wheatley’s book of poems, they reflect the similar experience of slavery, which greatly shapes the purpose and style of the author’s pieces. Much like Equiano, Phillis Wheatley was born in an African village. The only good memory recalled of her life in Africa was of her mother performing daily rituals to the rising sun in the mornings. She had the advantage of being purchased by Christian missionaries who were very kind to her. Her owners taught her to read and write, which led her to be the first African American woman to be published as a poet. It also caused her writing to be much more classical with a discreet sense of emotion. She used many allusions and...
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...The primary purpose of historical narratives is to report as accurately as possible what happened at each particular place and time in history. But each of the writers in this unit (De Vaca, Bradford, and Equiano) went beyond merely reporting the facts; they had other, more personal reasons for writing what they did. Each of them had a personal agenda. Equiano’s personal agenda in The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano was to shame his white audience into abolishing the slave trade by describing the horrible events that took place on the ship. While he did state facts about the ship, Equiano described personal experiences to persuade the audience more. For example, Equiano describes the smell of the hold as being “…so intolerably loathsome, that it was dangerous to...
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