Until fairly recently, critical studies and anthologies of African American literature generally began with the 1830s and 1840s. Yet there was an active and lively transatlantic black literary tradition as early as the 1760s. Genius in Bondage situates this literature in its own historical terms, rather than treating it as a sort of prologue to later African American writings. The contributors address the shifting meanings of race and gender during this period, explore how black identity was cultivated within a capitalist economy, discuss the impact of Christian religion and the Enlightenment on definitions of freedom and liberty, and identify ways in which black literature both engaged with and rebelled against Anglo-American culture.

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 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. Briton Hammon, James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw, John Marrant, Ignatius Sancho, Ottobah Cugoano, and Olaudah Equiano told their stories as Afro-Britons who recognized the sovereignty of George III; Johnson Green, Belinda, Benjamin Banneker, and Venture Smith spoke and wrote as African Americans n the United States; Phillis Wheatley, initially an Afro-British poet, later chose an African American identity; Francis Williams and George Liele wrote in Jamaica; David George and Boston King, having served with the British forces in the American Revolution and later lived in Canada, composed their narratives as British subjects in the newly established settlement in Sierra Leone, Africa. 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 African literature written in English.

This new edition of Phillis Wheatley Peters is the first full-length biography of the poet whose remarkable odyssey took her from being a child enslaved in Africa to becoming an international celebrity by the time she was in her early twenties, only to fall into relative obscurity when she died in 1784 at barely the age of thirty. Introduced to Benjamin Franklin in London, praised by her correspondent George Washington, and criticized by Thomas Jefferson, Phillis Wheatley (later Peters) laid claim to being the virtual poet laureate during the American Revolution as well as in the new United States. She overcame contemporaneous restraints of age, gender, race, and social status to assert her position as the unofficial spokesperson and critical observer of the nation that claimed to be founded on the principle that all men are created equal. Grounded in extensive primary research, Phillis Wheatley Peters recovers her life and times and reclaims the recognition and status she deserves as a heroic literary and political figure in an age of heroes. She is indisputably the founder of African American literature. Contemporary African American authors, including Nikki Giovanni, Amanda Gorman, Honoree Fanonne Jeffers, June Jordan, and Alice Walker, celebrate Phillis Wheatley Peters's transcendent literary achievement and influence. This new edition incorporates significant discoveries that Vincent Carretta and others have made since the book's initial publication about Wheatley's education, affiliations, activities, publications, marriage, husband, maternity, later years, and the posthumous survival of the manuscript of her proposed second volume of writings. Moreover, this new edition gives Carretta the opportunity to reconsider some previously available evidence.

Honorable Mention, Modern Language Association Prize for a Scholarly Edition, Modern Language Association This edition includes all of the known surviving writings of the poet Phillis Wheatley Peters (1753-1784), several of which have been discovered since the last attempt at a complete edition was published in 2001. Of the fifty-seven poems, as well as their authoritative variants, forty-six were published during her lifetime. Versions of nine of them were published before September 1773. Wheatley Peters published thirty-eight works in Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (London, 1773). Only seven of her poems were published between 1773 and her death in 1784. Eleven poems survive only in manuscript versions. This edition also includes all of Wheatley Peters' extant prose writings: twenty-three letters and four subscription proposals. It includes as well the three known surviving letters written to Wheatley Peters. Wheatley Peters' writings are accompanied by an Introduction to her life and times, as well as extensive textual and explanatory notes.

This edition includes all of the known surviving writings of the poet Phillis Wheatley (1753-1784), several of which have been discovered since the last attempt at a complete edition was published in 2001. Of the fifty-seven poems, as well as their authoritative variants, forty-six were published during her lifetime. Versions of nine of them were published before September 1773. Wheatley published thirty-eight works in Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (London, 1773). Only seven of her poems were published between 1773 and her death in 1784. Eleven poems survive only in manuscript versions. This edition also includes all of Wheatley's extant prose writings: twenty-three letters and four subscription proposals. It includes as well the three known surviving letters written to Wheatley. Wheatley's writings are accompanied by an Introduction to her life and times, as well as extensive textual and explanatory notes.

This transformative collection advances new approaches to Black intellectual history by foregrounding the experiences and ideas of people who lacked access to more privileged mechanisms of public discourse and power. While the anthology highlights renowned intellectuals such as W. E. B. Du Bois, it also spotlights thinkers such as enslaved people in the antebellum United States, US Black expatriates in Guyana, and Black internationals in Liberia. The knowledge production of these men, women, and children has typically been situated outside the disciplinary and conceptual boundaries of intellectual history. The volume centers on the themes of slavery and sexuality; abolitionism; Black internationalism; Black protest, politics, and power; and the intersections of the digital humanities and Black intellectual history. The essays draw from diverse methodologies and fields to examine the ideas and actions of Black thinkers from the eighteenth century to the present, offering fresh insights while creating space for even more creative approaches within the field. Timely and incisive, Ideas in Unexpected Places encourages scholars to ask new questions through innovative interpretive lenses-and invites students, scholars, and other practitioners to push the boundaries of Black intellectual history even further.

King George III inherited two legacies from the restoration of the monarchy in 1660: his crown and a tradition of regal satire. As the last British monarch who fully ruled as well as reigned and as the last king of America, George III was the target of constant satiric attacks even before he came to the throne in 1760 and for years after his death in 1820. An interdisciplinary and intercontinental study, this book examines the political satiric poetry and political graphic prints of Britain and Colonial America during the late Georgian period--a tumultuous era that witnessed the American and French revolutions, the Napoleonic wars, and the birth of the Romantic movement. Using George III as his focal point, Vincent Carretta draws on a wide range of verbal and visual sources to illuminate the development of satire from the work of Charles Churchill and William Hogarth to Lord Byron and George Cruikshank. Extending the argument from his earlier book, The Snarling Muse, which dealt with satire during the first half of the eighteenth century, Carretta demonstrates that the satiric line of descent from the early decades of the 1700s through the 1820s is much more direct than most scholars have recognized. Throughout the book, Carretta examines not only how the monarchy was reflected in satire but how satire in turn may have influenced the regal institution. In the 1790s, for example, British satirists discovered that their earlier attacks on the king for not being kingly enough had brought an unanticipated consequence: they had created the basis for the fictional commoner-king, Farmer George, which the king's supporters used with great rhetorical effectiveness against the threat of revolutionary French ideas. Enhanced by more than 160 illustrations, George III and the Satirists effectively demonstrates how a wide range of materials, verbal and visual, literary and nonliterary, can be marshaled in an interdisciplinary pursuit that crosses conventional fields and periods, repositioning artists and authors who are too often approached outside their original contexts.