Anne Bradstreet's Narrative Of The Life Of Women

The slave narrative was a literary form of African-American writing that developed in the middle of the nineteenth century. This genre that grew out of the written accounts of fugitive slaves about their lives in the South was integral to African-American literature. It depicted the brutality of whites as slave owners and was categorized into three subgenres: tales of religious redemption, tales to inspire the abolitionist struggle, and tales of progress. Those classified in the second category are usually autobiographical and they are considered the most literary writings by nineteenth-century African Americans. Two most famous of such works are Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845) by Frederick Douglass (1818-1895) and Incidents in
One of the most important early American writers of the colonial era was Anne Bradstreet (1612–1672). Although some women “turned to fiction writing as a way of voicing and advancing themselves through the mediation of the book” (622), many were reluctant or incapable to do so. After the Revolution the situation of women writers changed; “the transitional period between 1780 and 1830, a time during which women shifted from writing primarily for private audiences to writing for a broader public” (Zagarri 19). After the revolution the number of books, newspapers, and magazines increased. That led to the emergence of new audiences, including women. The first magazine to put “lady” in the title was The Gentleman and Lady’s Town and Country Magazine, published in 1784 (25). New publications needed more materials. That led to the entrance of new writers, especially women. “Women’s perceptions of themselves changed, too: rather than consumers of literature, they began to conceive of themselves as producers, as active agents who had something important to say to a public audience” (19). The Revolution increased the public presence and political role of