Unchained Voices
Subtitle: An Anthology of Black Authors in the English-Speaking World of the Eighteenth Century
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
Published: October 1996
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 387
ISBN-13: 9780813119762
Subjects: Black studies; Literary studies: 16th to 18th centuries; Other prose: 16th to 18th centuries; c 1700 to c 1800; English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh; 18th Century English Literature; Short Stories (Anthologies); Literary Criticism; Literature - Classics / Criticism; English; Reference; History; English-speaking countries; American - African American & Black; Sources; 18th century; Black authors; Blacks; English literature; Great Britain
First sentence: AS my Capacities and Condition of Life are very low, it cannot be expected that I should make those Remarks on the Sufferings I have met with, or the kind Providence of a good GOD for my Preservation, as one in a higher Station; but shall leave that to the Reader as he goes along, and so I shall only relate Matters of Fact as they occur to my Mind-
Description: In Unchained Voices, Vincent Carretta has assembled the most comprehensive anthology ever published of writings by eighteenth-century people of African descent, enabling many of these authors to be heard clearly for the first time in two centuries.

Their writings reflect the surprisingly diverse experiences of blacks on both sides of the Atlantic-America, Britain, the West Indies, and Africa - between 1760 and 1798. Letters, poems, captivity narratives, petitions, criminal autobiographies, economic treatises, travel accounts, and antislavery arguments were produced during a time of various and changing political and religious loyalties.

Although the theme of liberation from physical or spiritual captivity runs throughout the collection, freedom also clearly led to hardship and disappointment for a number of these authors.

In his introduction, Carretta reconstructs the historical and cultural context of the works, emphasizing the constraints of the eighteenth-century genres under which these authors wrote. The texts and annotations are based on extensive research in both published and manuscript holdings of archives in the United States and the United Kingdom.

Appropriate for undergraduates as well as for scholars, Unchained Voices gives a clear sense of the major literary and cultural issues at the heart of writings in English by people of African descent.