Published in November 1877, Black Beauty is one of the most popular and enduring works of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The book, in which the eponymous narrator relates his life's story, sold well following its publication in England and in the United States; by 1985, sales were estimated at over forty million. While usually regarded as entertaining, Black Beauty has a strong crusading purpose: Anna Sewell herself said she wrote to improve the treatment of horses. This study springs from an intuitive notion. While reading the 1845 Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, I could not shake a "curiously different sense of familiarity" that took me home to my well-worn copy of Black Beauty. The more I explored a relationship between Douglass's Narrative and Black Beauty, the more apparent it became that these two works were interrelated in ways that had yet to be explored in critical literature. Although comparisons between animals and slaves have long been made-slaves themselves recognized and used such comparisons-the relationship between animal autobiography and the slave narrative has only recently been recognized. In 1994 Moira Ferguson sketched several commonalities between the two genres. In 2003 Tess Cosslett made an explicit-if brief-comparison of the animal autobiography and the slave narrative, a comparison developed in depth in her 2006 study Talking Animals in British Children's Literature 1786-1914. This thesis investigates that relationship further. It begins by briefly reviewing generic criticism, moves to a consideration of the various genres into which critics have placed Black Beauty, and then examines the text as a slave narrative, focusing upon James Olney's 1985 discussion of the conventions of the slave narrative. Finally, it considers Elizabeth W. Bruss's study of autobiographical acts as a literary genre for additional areas that establish my original "sense of familiarity." In short, this thesis confirms Black Beauty's rhetorical, formal, thematic, and social power within the genre of the American antebellum slave narrative.

The horse-book is a literary genre which is considered very popular among young girls. Black Beauty (1877) by Anna Sewell is the very first horse-book and was therefore what started the genre. It is highly different from the horse-books of today which is what this paper looks at to see how the genre has evolved. This is done by comparing Sewell’s novel to Britta och Silver (1966) by Lisbeth Pahnke and Alla älskar Sigge (2004) by Lin Hallberg. This is done by looking at how these novels are alike and different from one another with connection to the horse and the human. And how it differs when the horse is the narrator as compared to when the human takes the narrating role. In Black Beauty the horse is telling its life story and how humans treat the horse as some of the people in the novel are cruel towards horses. Many of the dangerous moments are caused by the humans being mean towards the horse. Whereas in the other books it is pure accident, the danger also mildens. In Britta och Silver there are mainly riding accidents but also a death incident where a horse dies. In Alla älskar Sigge the most dangerous thing that happens is that a pony gets so sick that it must go to the hospital where it is cured. These dangers getting milder is connected to how the genre is targeted towards a younger audience nowadays. In all three books there is also a clear boy-girl relationship between horse and human. The narrative makes how the human girl views the male horse sound like a description of a love interest. This makes the genre heteronormative. And with the narrative switching from the horse to the human there is also shown more of the human’s relations to one another and rivalry in the stable.