Overview
In Unchained Voices, Vincent Carretta has assembled the most comprehensive anthology ever published of writings by eighteenth-century people of African descent, enabling many of these authors to be heard clearly for the first time in two centuries. Their writings reflect the surprisingly diverse experiences of blacks on both sides of the Atlantic-America, Britain, the West Indies, and Africa - between 1760 and 1798. Letters, poems, captivity narratives, petitions, criminal autobiographies, economic treatises, travel accounts, and antislavery arguments were produced during a time of various and changing political and religious loyalties. Although the theme of liberation from physical or spiritual captivity runs throughout the collection, freedom also clearly led to hardship and disappointment for a number of these authors. In his introduction, Carretta reconstructs the historical and cultural context of the works, emphasizing the constraints of the eighteenth-century genres under which these authors wrote. The texts and annotations are based on extensive research in both published and manuscript holdings of archives in the United States and the United Kingdom. Appropriate for undergraduates as well as for scholars, Unchained Voices gives a clear sense of the major literary and cultural issues at the heart of writings in English by people of African descent.Editorials
African American Review
This excellent anthology meets a longstanding need for a scholarly collection of early Anglo African and African American writers.From the Publisher
"An important work for gaining an understanding of a heretofore little examined aspect of the eighteenth century." -- Bloomsbury Review
"The selection of texts is diverse and wide-ranging.... The most comprehensive anthology on the subject and deserves to become the standard text for students in eighteenth-century studies and American studies." -- British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies
"Establishes the canon of Black diasporic authors writing in English in the 18th century and makes the texts accessible to scholars and students." -- East-Central Intelligencer
"Carretta has done eighteenth-century studies an immeasurable service.... The definitive anthology of black writing of the eighteenth-century African diaspora, serving the purpose of both introduction to and contestation of the overlapping fields of American, British, religious, and African studies." -- Eighteenth-Century Fiction
"Most challenging and exhaustive, both in quality and quantity of research, presentation, scope, and premise. Carretta seeks to validate what for him is an unbroken link of unshackled black literary voices." -- Eighteenth-Century Studies
"This is the most comprehensive collection of writings by people of African descent on both sides of the Atlantic more than 200 years ago." -- Lexington Herald-Leader
"An excellent anthology." -- Times Literary Supplement
"Cause for celebration.... Will no doubt contribute to the ongoing rethinking of the eighteenth-century canon." -- Year's Work in English Studies