Abstract
Horror is often associated with Romanticism, but during the Romantic period, many Africans and African Americans lived realities unmatched by the imagination or nightmares of authors of fiction. This selection relates slave experiences through the literature of slave narrative, historical fiction, historical account, neo-slave narrative, and film adaptation. From its analysis, readers see horrific realities experienced by people exclusively because of race. Individuals experienced both physical and psychological trauma as both victims and witnesses of physical abuse and torture from bondage, beatings, sexual assaults, and the psychological torture of family separations. This study shows how slavery’s horrors and trauma reached across time and space to manifest themselves in the neo-slave narratives and film adaptations of literary and historical selections in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
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Notes
- 1.
Found in the “Speech to the Second Virginia Convention.”
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Taylor, O.W. (2018). Horror, Race, and Reality. In: Corstorphine, K., Kremmel, L. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook to Horror Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97406-4_32
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97406-4_32
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