North American slave narratives

Slave narratives by slaves from North America were first published in England in the 18th century, and they soon became a mainstay of African-American literature. Slave narratives were publicized by abolitionists. During the first half of the 19th century, the controversy over slavery in the United States led to impassioned literature on both sides of the issue. In addition to first-person accounts, novels such as Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) represented the abolitionist view of the evils of slavery. The so-called anti-Tom novels by white, southern writers, such as William Gilmore Simms, represented the pro-slavery viewpoint.

To present the reality of slavery, a number of former slaves such as Harriet Jacobs and Frederick Douglass published accounts of their enslavement. Eventually some six thousand former slaves from North America and the Caribbean wrote accounts of their lives, with about 150 of these published as separate books or pamphlets.

These can be broadly categorized into three distinct forms: tales of religious redemption, tales to inspire the abolitionist struggle, and tales of progress. The tales written to inspire the abolitionist struggle are the most famous because they tend to have a strong autobiographical motif, such as in Frederick Douglass's autobiographies and Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Jacobs.

Frederick Douglass (1818 - 1895):

• Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845)

• My Bondage and My Freedom (1855)

• Examples of American tales of the self-made man

Harriet Ann Jacobs (1813 – 1897) was an American writer, who escaped from slavery and became an abolitionist speaker and reformer. Jacobs' single work, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, published in 1861 under the pseudonym Linda Brent, was one of the first autobiographical narratives about the struggle for freedom by female slaves and an account of the sexual harassment and abuse they endured.

Transcendentalism

The Big Three:

Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Margaret Fuller.

*"The spirit of the time is in every form a protest against usage and a search for principles." - Emerson

*"I was given to understand that whatever was unintelligible would be certainly Transcendental." - Charles Dickens

*"I should have told them at once that I was a transcendentalist. That would have been the shortest way of telling them that they would not understand my explanations." – Thoreau

Longman

Transcendentalism - the belief that knowledge can be obtained by studying thought rather than by practical experience

It is a concept which suggests that the external is united with the internal. Physical or material nature is neutral or indifferent or objective; it is neither helpful nor hurtful; it is neither beautiful nor ugly. What makes one give such attributes to nature is that individual's imposition of her/his temperament or mood or psyche. If I'm feeling lousy, I may dismiss a gorgeous day; if I'm feeling bright and cheerful then the most dreary of days becomes tolerable. And so, the Transcendentalists believed that "knowing yourself" and "studying nature" is the same activity. Nature mirrors our psyche. If I cannot understand myself, may be understanding nature will help. Here is Darrel Abel's "take" on this concept:

"Since one divine character was immanent everywhere in nature and in man, man's reason could discern the spiritual ideas in nature and his senses could register impressions of the material forms of nature. To man the subject, nature the object, which shared the same divine constitution as himself, presented external images to the innate ideas in his soul. "

Transcendentalism and the American Past

Transcendentalism as a movement is rooted in the American past: To Puritanism it owed its pervasive morality and the "doctrine of divine light." It is also similar to the Quaker "inner light." However, both these concepts assume acts of God, whereas intuition is an act of an individual. In Unitarianism, deity was reduced to a kind of immanent principle in every person - an individual was the true source of moral light. To Romanticism it owed the concept of nature as a living mystery and not a clockwork universe (deism) which is fixed and permanent.

Transcendentalism was a 1. spiritual, 2. philosophical and 3. literary movement and is located in the history of American Thought as

(a). Post-Unitarian and free thinking in religious spirituality (b). Kantian and idealistic in philosophy and (c). Romantic and individualistic in literature.