Critical Study of Rowson's "Slaves in Algiers; or, A Struggle for Freedom"


Book Description

Essay from the year 2012 in the subject Literature - Africa, grade: 14/20, University Hassan II. Casablanca, course: Cultural History of Moroccan American Relations, language: English, abstract: This essay tries to shed light on the hidden relationship between literature and ideology. It focuses more specifically on captivity narratives, which were once one of the most important literary writings vis-a-vis their impact on shaping people's opinion on the one hand but also on influencing the decision-makings in the political arena on the other hand. The piece of 'literature' that this essays examines is called: Slaves in Algiers; Or, A Struggle for Freedom by Susanna Rowson.




Slaves in Algiers


Book Description

As Americans began defining who was to be counted a citizen in their newly-established republic, Susanna Rowson’s comic opera Slaves in Algiers (1794) makes an earnest case that women be accorded the rights guaranteed to men, playfully turning sexual hierarchies on their head: “Women were born for universal sway; / Men to adore, be silent, and obey.” A fast-paced plot, engaging characterization, and rollicking songs ensured that Slaves in Algiers garnered success when it was first performed at the New Theater in Philadelphia. But Rowson’s play also engages in perpetuating racial stereotypes: set in Algiers at a time when Barbary pirates were seizing more and more U.S. ships in the Mediterranean Sea, Slaves in Algiers is written for a largely white audience driven by outrage at the enslavement of white people in the Barbary states. The play is critical of many aspects of North African cultures, particularly the practices of piracy and enslavement, while not acknowledging the moral and ethical taint of America’s own enslavement of African Americans. In recent years, critics have given increased attention to Slaves in Algiers, particularly to its interwoven feminist, nationalist, and imperialist themes, as well as to its treatment of Muslim and Jewish characters. This volume is one of a number of editions that have been drawn from the pages of the acclaimed Broadview Anthology of American Literature; like the others, it is designed to make a range of material from the anthology available in a format convenient for use in a wide variety of contexts.




Reuben and Rachel


Book Description

Susanna Haswell Rowson, a popular and prolific writer, actress, and educator in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, had a truly transatlantic life and career, moving twice from England to America and publishing extensively in both countries. A transatlantic sensibility informs her fictionalized “history” of America, Reuben and Rachel, which traces ten generations of an extended family, beginning with the marriage of Christopher Columbus’s son to a native Peruvian princess, moving through the Tudor succession crises and the colonial settlement of New England, and ending with the title characters, who leave England for America, renounce titles of nobility, and consider their children “true-born Americans.” In Rowson’s representation, the American character derives from fusion and hybridity, the results of intermarriage across racial, religious and national lives.




The Broadview Anthology of American Literature Volumes A & B: Beginnings to Reconstruction


Book Description

This product contains both The Broadview Anthology of American Literature Volume A: Beginnings to 1820 and The Broadview Anthology of American Literature Volume B: 1820 to Reconstruction as a single purchase. Covering American literature from its pre-contact Indigenous beginnings through the Reconstruction period, the first two volumes of The Broadview Anthology of American Literature represent a substantial reconceiving of the canon of early American literature. Guided by the latest scholarship in American literary studies, and deeply committed to inclusiveness, social responsibility, and rigorous contextualization, the anthology balances representation of widely agreed-upon major works with an emphasis on American literature’s diversity, variety, breadth, and connections with the rest of the Americas. Highlights of Volumes A & B: Beginnings to Reconstruction • Complete texts of Mary Rowlandson’s captivity narrative, The Coquette, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave; and Benito Cereno • In-depth, Contexts sections on such topics as “Slavery and Resistance,” “Print Culture and Popular Literature,” “Expansion, Native American Expulsion, and Manifest Destiny,” and “Gender and Sexuality” • Broader and more extensive coverage of Indigenous oral and visual literature and African American oral literature than in competing anthologies • Full author sections in the anthology are devoted to authors such as Anne Hutchinson, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Briton Hammon, Jane Johnston Schoolcraft, José Maria Heredia, Black Hawk, and many others




The Romance of the Holy Land in American Travel Writing, 1790–1876


Book Description

This book is the first to engage with the full range of American travel writing about nineteenth-century Ottoman Palestine, and the first to acknowledge the influence of the late-eighteenth-century Barbary captivity narrative on nineteenth-century travel writing about the Middle East. Brian Yothers argues that American travel writing about the Holy Land forms a coherent, if greatly varied, tradition, which can only be fully understood when works by major writers such as Twain and Melville are studied alongside missionary accounts, captivity narratives, chronicles of religious pilgrimages, and travel writing in the genteel tradition. Yothers also examines works by lesser-known authors such as Bayard Taylor, John Lloyd Stephens, and Clorinda Minor, demonstrating that American travel writing is marked by a profound intertextuality with the Hebrew and Christian scriptures and with British and continental travel narratives about the Holy Land. His concluding chapter on Melville's Clarel shows how Melville's poem provides an incisive critique of the nascent imperial discourse discernible in the American texts with which it is in dialogue.




Crisis and Legitimacy in Atlantic American Narratives of Piracy


Book Description

This Open Access book, Crisis and Legitimacy in Atlantic American Narratives of Piracy: 1678-1865, examines literary and visual representations of piracy beginning with A.O. Exquemelin’s 1678 Buccaneers of America and ending at the onset of the US-American Civil War. Examining both canonical and understudied texts—from Puritan sermons, James Fenimore Cooper’s The Red Rover, and Herman Melville’s “Benito Cereno” to the popular cross-dressing female pirate novelette Fanny Campbell, and satirical decorated Union envelopes, this book argues that piracy acted as a trope to negotiate ideas of legitimacy in the contexts of U.S. colonialism, nationalism, and expansionism. The readings demonstrate how pirates were invoked in transatlantic literary production at times when dominant conceptions of legitimacy, built upon categorizations of race, class, and gender, had come into crisis. As popular and mobile maritime outlaw figures, it is suggested, pirates asked questions about might and right at critical moments of Atlantic history.




Rogue Performances


Book Description

Rogue Performances recovers eighteenth and nineteenth-century American culture s fascination with outcast and rebellious characters. Highwaymen, thieves, beggars, rioting mobs, rebellious slaves, and mutineers dominated the stage in the period s most popular plays. Peter Reed also explores ways these characters helped to popularize theatrical forms such as ballad opera, patriotic spectacle, blackface minstrelsy, and melodrama. Reed shows how both on and offstage, these paradoxically powerful, persistent, and troubling figures reveal the contradictions of class and the force of the disempowered in the American theatrical imagination. Through analysis of both well known and lesser known plays and extensive archival research, this book challenges scholars to re-think their assumptions about the role of class in antebellum American drama.




Nineteenth-century Literature Criticism


Book Description

Excerpts from criticism of the works of novelists, poets, playwrights, short story writers and other creative writers who lived between 1800 and 1900, from the first published critical appraisals to current evaluations.




Critical Study of Rowson’s Slaves in Algiers; or, A Struggle for Freedom.


Book Description

Essay from the year 2012 in the subject World History - General and Comparison, grade: 14/20, University Hassan II. Casablanca, language: English, abstract: Slaves in Algiers; or, A Struggle for Freedom (1794) is a play written by Susanna Haswell Rowson. The setting takes place in “Barbary” – the Mediterranean coast of North Africa – and more precisely in Algiers. The play centers on the lives of several American ‘slaves’ who plot their escape in an unflappable look for freedom. The relevance of studying a piece of literature - and more precisely, a play - stems from the idea that people in the time, used to watch plays, more than they would read books because plays were regarded as being more ‘entertaining’. In addition to that, although plays are a fictitious form of literature, they were always related to real events; hence the majority of people consider them as being true or as at least as referring to some real events. Another point would be that literature in that time was -often- judged on the basis of the moral values it contained. In that regard, Slaves in Algiers; or, A Struggle for Freedom is a rich document to be scrutinized with as much seriousness as when dealing with other sources that are considered as more ‘factual’. Therefore the need to study such a piece emanates from its very crucial role in shaping social reality , via its representation of ‘Barbary’ and its reflections over the nature of freedom, slavery and race.




Our South


Book Description

This work tracks the nation/South juxtaposition in US literature from the founding to the turn of the 20th century, through genres including travel writing, gothic and romance novels, geography textbooks, transcendentalist prose, and abolitionist address.