The Interesting Narrative (Oxford World’s Classics)

Product Description

Olaudah Equiano’s
Interesting Narrative, in which the author describes his birth in Africa, his enslavement and transportation to America, and his journey from slavery to freedom, was published just a few days before the British parliament first debated the abolition of the slave trade in
1789. As a first-hand account of the horrors of slavery, it was a vital part of the campaign to end that “accursed trade,” but the book is far more than merely a political pamphlet. It is the most important African autobiography of the eighteenth century, telling the story of a life of high
adventure on land and sea, from the Caribbean to the North Pole via America, Turkey, and Great Britain, in a style that remains lively and engaging to this day.

This new edition includes an introduction surveying the recent debates about Equiano’s birthplace and identity, and showing how the book achieved its increasingly central position among the great works of eighteenth-century literature.

Review

“This book will change our assumptions about slavery and affect, and also change our sense of what works can be connected to this vast enterprise. It makes for what is sometimes surprising reading, but it also makes so much sense that the century will never again look quite the same as it did before
this book.” – George E. Haggerty,
SEL Studies in English Literature 1500-1900

“The appetite for Equiano and his memoir shows no signs of abating, as this new edition shows.” – James Walvin,
The Times Saturday Review

“This edition of Equiano’s
The Interesting Narrative, paired with Carey’s introduction and explanatory materials, provides a text that is meaningful across educational levels and backgrounds. It should help to ensure that Equiano’s text, with its relevance to multiple disciplines and areas of
inquiry, does not again disappear from our awareness. —
International Journal of African Historical Studies

About the Author

Brycchan Carey is an expert in the cultural history of slavery and its abolition. He is the author of
From Peace to Freedom: Quaker Rhetoric and the Birth of American Antislavery, 1658-1761 (Yale UP, 2012), and
British Abolitionism and the Rhetoric of Sensibility: Writing, Sentiment, and Slavery,

1760-1807 (Palgrave, 2005). His most recent collection,
Quakers and Abolition, co-edited with Geoffrey Plank, was published by the University of Illinois Press in 2014.