Thesis (B.A.)--Haverford College, Dept. of English, 2004. / Includes bibliographical references.

Th. 3e cycle--Civilisation américaine--Paris 1, 2001. / Cet ouvrage constitue la thèse de R. Mfoumou-Arthur sur "The interesting narrative" / Olaudah Equiano, 1789. Bibliogr. p. 313-318.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Lehigh University, 2001. / Includes vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 213-223).

<p>In the decades following the English Civil War, as the Anglophone world began transitioning to a social order structured by market and finance capitalism, the word cultivation, which earlier had referred exclusively to agricultural processes, acquired increasingly figurative meanings referring to the development of an individual's mind, faculties, and manners. This augmentation of meaning reflected the development of new conceptions of property as an essential feature of personhood that had begun to alter the definition of subjectivity. The circulation of such figurative meanings coincides with the rise of print culture, the development of a literary public sphere, and the professionalization of writing in the eighteenth century. These cultural developments suggest the relative ease with which the new conception of property expressed as literary personality coexisted alongside other forms of capital in Britain. Literary criticism of the last forty years, including the work of Raymond Williams, Clifford Siskin, Jerome Christensen, and Thomas Pfau, has accounted for the many ways in which possessing literary cultivation served the development of a middle-class economy and ideology in eighteenth-and-nineteenth century Britain. Though the figurative meaning of cultivation appears throughout American literature of the long nineteenth century, thus attesting to the concept's transatlantic migration and adaptation to the socio-political climates of the New World, no significant studies of American literature have considered the role literary cultivation itself plays in shaping American ideas of personality. My study begins to facilitate an understanding of how modern definitions of property affected and effected early American literary culture.</p><p>By placing American literature of the long nineteenth century in a transatlantic context, I show how five works by De Crevecoeur, Franklin, Equiano, Brockden Brown, and Margaret Fuller model the relationship between real and metaphorical cultivation at the level of both form and narrative content. I argue that within these works literary personality appears as a threat to the American character unless it directly facilitates the acquisition of real property. That in an American context figurative cultivation is at all times subordinated to real cultivation suggests a suspicion of intellectual development at the very foundations of American culture. I draw on new work in early American literature, eighteenth-century studies, British Romanticism, and on a tradition of Marxist critique to read American personality not as an exceptional and isolated development of the revolutionary era, but as a transatlantic migration of cultural forms and conceptions that adapt and mutate upon arriving on New World soil. To understand these migrations and mutations, I map the importation of European aesthetic concepts and literary sources within American productions. My readings make sense of the contradictions within the anti-literary American ideology often articulated in the content of works, whose forms nevertheless reveal a comprehensive engagement with literary history. Doing so allows me to demonstrate the complex ways in which early American authors depicted literary cultivation as either a means of acquiring real property or as a moral redress against the self interest of a speculative economic culture.</p> / Dissertation

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Missouri-Columbia, 2001. / Typescript. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 174-181). Also available on the Internet.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Missouri-Columbia, 2001. / Typescript. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 174-181). Also available on the Internet.

This thesis asserts that the slave narratives are a significant resource for philosophers. Following Lewis Gordon, I argue that the slave narratives should not be understood merely as experiential evidence by which to validate Western thought. Instead, the narratives should be read as moments in which Black narrators shared their unique insights on the Western world. In line with Angela Davis, I argue that these critiques are still relevant to philosophers of this day and age. However, I argue that Davis' Marxist reading of Frederick Douglass' Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave is still vulnerable to Gordon's criticism. Using the narrative Olaudah Equiano, I demonstrate that by reading the slave narratives as expressing unique thoughts, philosophers can discover new resources to invigorate their philosophical inquiries.

Olaudah Equiano or Gustavas Vassa may have had abolitionist motivations when writing The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano or Gustavas Vassa, the African, Written by Himself, but the function of the text is much different and self-serving. Specifically, in looking closely at the wording of the text, with its language of we versus they, in group versus out group, ours versus theirs, Equiano clearly feels he at no time belongs fully to any specific group or place; rather, he only partially belongs anywhere, and thus, creates this work of autobiography and appropriation of fiction and oral tradition to negotiate and cultivate his own liminal, or even heterotopic, space. In other words, I suggest he may have used the writing of this text to define his sense of self, creating a space in which he was both in control and fully belonged.

The dissertation argues that the development of the British abolition movement was based on the abolitionists' perception that their actions were kairotic; they attempted to shape their own kairos by taking temporal events and reinterpreting them to construct a kairotic process that led to a perceived fulfillment: abolition. Thus, the dissertation examines the rhetorical strategies used by white abolitionists to construct an abolitionist kairos that was designed to produce salvation for white Britons more than it was to help free blacks. The dissertation especially examines the three major texts produced by black persons living in England during the late eighteenth centuryIgnatius Sancho's Letters of the Late Ignatius Sancho (1782), Ottobauh Cugoano's Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil of Slavery (1787), and Olaudah Equiano's The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African (1789)to illustrate how black rhetoric was appropriated by whites to fulfill their own kairotic desires. By examining the rhetorical strategies employed in both white and black rhetorics, the dissertation illustrates how the abolitionists thought the movement was shaped by, and how they were shaping the movement through, kairotic time. While the dissertation contends that the abolition movement was rhetorically designed to provide redemption, and thus salvation, it illustrates that the abolitionist's intent was not merely to save the slave, but to redeem blacks first in the eyes of white Christians by opening blacks to an understanding and acceptance of God. Perhaps more importantly, abolitionists would use black salvation to buy back their own souls and the soul of their nation in the eyes of God in order to regain their own salvation lost in the slave trade. But ironically, they had to appear to be saving others to save themselves. So white abolitionists used the black narratives to persuade their overwhelmingly white audience that slavery was as bad for them as it was for the African slave. And in the process, a corpus of black writing was produced that gives current readers two glimpses of one world.

This study examines the slave narratives The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, The History of Mary Prince, A West Indian Slave, Related by Herself and The Bondwoman’s Narrative to determine the way in which these texts depict the economics of labor in slave society. Taking into account the specific socio-historical contexts in which these narratives were written, this study analyzes the way in which the representations of labor in these narratives interrogate slavery and address issues relating to the social relations and power dynamics of their respective societies. Emphasis is given to the way in which the gender complexities of slavery merge with the dynamics of labor thereby underscoring some of the peculiarities of the female slave experience.