Literature, Art and Slavery: Ekphrastic Visions

Since around 2000, there has been a noticeable upsurge in critical work on the visual archive of Atlantic slavery, resulting in a host of important studies. While most of these contributions are weighted towards images created during the era of slavery itself, some critics have adopted a more historically far-reaching approach, exploring the ways in which such images live on beyond the original context of their production, circulation and consumption, returning imaginatively in different forms at different times and in different places. This book shares the fascination with the afterlives which such visual materials have enjoyed, but places the accent on how that posterity has evolved in the realms of literature, especially poetry. It focuses on transactions between texts written between the mid-1990s and 2020 and images of slavery that belong to British, American and (in one case) French traditions, as produced between c. 1779 and 1939.


About the Author

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.