Literature, Art and Slavery

Carl Plasa is a Professor of English Literature in the School of English, Communication and Philosophy at Cardiff University, having lectured previously at the Universities of Manchester and Cork. He has written numerous essays and articles on British, American, Caribbean and African American Literature, as well as three monographs: Slaves to Sweetness: British and Caribbean Literatures of Sugar (Liverpool University Press, 2009); Charlotte Brontë (Palgrave, 2004); and Textual Politics from Slavery to Postcolonialism: Race and Identification (Macmillan, 2000). He is currently researching a new book on the Pre-Raphaelites and their legacies from the 1930s to the present day.

In this ingenious study, Carl Plasa examines how visual images of slavery from the last three centuries reverberate in contemporary literary works, ranging from David Dabydeen’s "Turner" to F. Douglas Brown's Icon. While the horrors of the slave trade have often been suppressed by historians, Plasa shows how this suppression has been challenged by influential (and less familiar) artworks and their eloquent afterlives in literature.

• List of FiguresSeries Editors' PrefaceAcknowledgementsIntroduction: Reframing Ekphrasis1. Adding to the Picture: New Perspectives on David Dabydeen’s ‘Turner’2. Looking beyond ‘Turner’: William B. Patrick’s ‘The Slave Ship’3. ‘Slave-Ships on Fantastic Seas’: The Art of Abolition4. The Secret Afterlives of Dido Elizabeth Belle5. African-American Ekphrasis and the ‘Peculiar Institution’6. Icon-versations: F. Douglas Brown, Jacob Lawrence and Frederick DouglassBibliographyIndex