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Olaudah Equiano:
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Description:
Academic study of Olaudah Equiano has been energised in recent years by arguments asserting that some aspects of The Interesting Narrative (1789) may not represent Equiano's personal experience. In particular, the critics S.E. Ogude and Vincent Carretta have cast doubt over Equiano's account of his birth and upbringing in Africa, his kidnapping, and his experience of the Middle Passage. While Ogude's argument is based in textual analysis, Carretta's evidence emerges from archival work - yet both reach similar conclusions: that Equiano probably never visited Africa, and that the early parts of his Narrative are most likely rhetorical exercises, largely 'based on oral history and reading, rather than on personal experience'.Until now, Ogude and Carretta's findings have not been fully tested by the academy, nor have all the possible implications been explored. The many students and general readers of Equiano are invited to read the early Narrative as unproblematic, while professional critics and historians, even when reading the text as 'literary' or 'rhetorical', tend to accept that its underlying narrative reflects Equiano's actual childhood experience. In fact, Equiano's Narrative may well remain the best and most reliable source of information about Equiano's early life, but this belief can no longer remain unquestioned. Accordingly, this collection offers a forum for scholars to assess the state of Equiano studies after Ogude and Carretta's essays, and to point the way for further research, both in the light of Ogude and Carretta, and in the light of other recent research into, and thought about, the historical, interpretative, biographical, rhetorical, and literary issues arising from our various approaches to The Interesting Narrative.
Publication Details:
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