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Publication detail

“We were but property – not a mother, and the children God had given her”: the figure of a child in abolitionist literature

Authors: Bubíková Šárka

Year: 2014

Type of publication: ostatní - přednáška nebo poster

Page from-to: nestránkováno

Titles:

Language	Name	Abstract	Keywords
eng	“We were but property – not a mother, and the children God had given her”: the figure of a child in abolitionist literature	The presentation discussed the use of the figure of sorrowing child in slave narratives and in texts by abolitionists. It drew attention to the way the abolitionist rhetoric made use of the sharp contrast between the period’s idealization of childhood as a state of innocence and purity and the reality of slave childhood. In that way the literature challenged the “paternalistic” justification of slavery and exposed it as inhibiting the performance of the ideal of childhood.	Slave childhood; sorrowing child; abolitionist literature; slave narratives