Instructions, Suggestions and Resources for Literature Review (8th Edition)

Abolition of the Slave Trade and Slavery: Literature Review

“Literature and the telling of stories are indispensable to our ability to cope with that mighty construct we call the human condition. After all, why does man need bread? To survive, but why survive if it’s only to eat more bread? To live is more than just a sustained life; it is to enrich and be enriched by life.”—Shasi Taroor

Sources and Documentation

Remember that your paper should be a critical review, not just a summary of the work or a biography of the author; it should clearly demonstrate that you have read and understood the work. In addition, you should evaluate it within the context of its impact on the human rights movement. Select a work of significant literary quality; read and study the work; research its reception and impact; read and incorporate critical reviews of the work. Your final paper should include references to the scholarly sources you used to evaluate it, documented following the MLA format, 8th Edition. Below are some sample citations for the type of sources you will most likely consult.

Double space and use hanging indent (Canvas did not retain the correct formatting for some examples.)

Sample book:

Jones, Edward P. The Known World. HarperCollins, 2003.

Sample republication of an older book:

Hurston, Zora Neale. Mules and Men. 1935. Harpers, 1990.

Sample books online:

Stowe, Harriet Beecher. Uncle Tom’s Cabin or Life Among the Lowly. Clarke & Company, 1852. Project Gutenberg, 13 Jan. 2006. www.gutenberg.org/files/203/203-h/203-h.htm#link2H_4_0001.

Brown, Henry Box. Narrative of the Life of Henry Box Brown Written by Himself. Manchester, 1851. Documenting the American South, University of North Carolina, 1999. docsouth.unc.edu/neh/brownbox/brownbox.html.

Sample articles online:

Parkus, Robert D. and Mary Schlosser. “Aspects of the Publishing History of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 1851-1900.” Catherine Pelton Durrell ’25, Archives and Special Collections. 2001-2005, Vassar College Libraries. specialcollections.vassar.edu/exhibit-highlights/2001-2005/stowe/essay2.html.

Holmes, Marian Smith. “The Great Escape from Slavery of Ellen and William Craft.” Smithsonian.com, 16 June 2010, www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-great-escape-from-slavery-of-ellen-and-william-craft-497960/.

Sample essay or story in an anthology:

Thoreau, Henry David. “Civil Disobedience.” The American Tradition in Literature, edited by George Perkins and Barbara Perkins. 11th ed., McGraw Hill, 2007.

Sample poem online:

Wheatley, Phillis. “On Virtue.” Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral. London, 1773. American Verse Project. University of Michigan Humanities Text Initiative, 1999. quod.lib.umich.edu/a/amverse/BAP5379.0001.001?view=toc.

Sample review (Instructions and examples are excerpted from Purdue University OWL  (Links to an external site.)“>http://antislavery.eserver.org/ (Links to an external site.). Additional resources include the polemic writings of such antislavery advocates as William Lloyd Garrison, Theodore Parker, Wendell Phillips, and Theodore Dwight Weld. Henry David Thoreau’s essay “Civil Disobedience” expressed his opposition to slavery and the Mexican War and ultimately became one of the most influential documents in literary and political history.

If you prefer more contemporary literature, you may want to explore the work of post-Civil War writers, especially Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. W.E.B DuBois, Souls of Black Folk, is a classic nonfiction work on the continuing legacy of slavery. Black novelists and poets of the early 20th century such as Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, Richard Wright, Zora Neale Hurston, Claude McKay, Jean Toomer, and Arna Bontemps all dealt with the legacy of slavery. More recent works include Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Mercy, Charles Johnson’s Middle Passage, Edward Jones’ The Known World, Alice Randall’s Wind Done Gone (retells Gone with the Wind from the perspective of Scarlet’s half- sister, a slave) William Styron’s The Confessions of Nat Turner, Isabel Allende, Island Beneath the Sea, and Barack Obama’s speech on race delivered during the 2008 presidential campaign. Finally, you might want to look at slavery in the world today: Kevin Bales’s Disposable People: New Slavery in the Global Economy.

Questions to Consider:

Some of the following questions will not apply to all genres; they are just intended to help you get started.

• Who is the author and what is his or her background?
• How does the work relate to and/or draw from other works of the era?
• What were the primary influences on the work?
• How has the work been received by the public and by critics?
• How has it influenced other literary works?
• Describe the most memorable characters. What techniques did the author use to engage readers with these characters?
• How did the author use language effectively to convey his or her message?
• How is the plot structured? Is it effective?
• In your opinion, does the work qualify as literature or is it essentially propaganda?
• How has the work contributed to the growth of the human rights movement?