ABSTRACT
Slavery emerges fictionally in various contexts, and can be understood only by working through a number of related issues, and especially the cross-cultural misapprehensions characteristic of inter-racial romance. ‘Slavery’ as a phenomenon cannot be understood merely through the fatal statistics favoured by historical positivism. It needs the support of narrative reconstruction in order to be apprehended as a lived experience shared by many. As the sentimentalist, didactic, and gothic forms of fiction were prominent in the late eighteenth century, representations of slavery were refracted through these generic prisms to produce a spectrum of norms, expectations, and conventions. A survey of fictional sub-genres at the century’s end reveals fictional representations of slavery co-habiting with many other topics in sentimental, gothic, and didactic novels, as well as in children’s literature, (Jacobin and anti-Jacobin) political fiction, and religious tracts. The literary history of anti-slavery presents challenging complexities of theme, form, and context.
