Liberation Narratives: Out from Slavery

Exemplars of Pioneering Texts: Frederick Douglass’s ‘Narrative’ and Harriet Jacobs’s ‘Incidents’

Americans have pioneered much the world enjoys: jazz, blue jeans, the lightbulb, airplanes, basketball. And, though non-American precedents exist, because of the peculiar fact of our peculiar institution we’ve also led the way in the literary genre known as the slave narrative.

I recently read two exemplars of the form, Frederick Douglass’s Narrative of …