caa a22 4500 378885405 CHVBK 20180305123441.0 cr unu---uuuuu 161128e200404 xx s 000 0 eng 10.1515/zaa.2004.52.2.107 doi (NATIONALLICENCE)gruyter-10.1515/zaa.2004.52.2.107 Zwierlein Anne-Julia ‘Poor Negro-Girl,' ‘Little Black Boy': Constructing Childhood in Eighteenth-Century Slave Narratives, Abolitionist Propaganda and Postcolonial Novels [Elektronische Daten] [Anne-Julia Zwierlein] This article examines how eighteenth-century black writers and white abolitionists used the image of the slave child for their respective political purposes. (Auto-)biographies written by and about slaves abducted as children from Africa such as The Life of James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw (1772) and The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano (1789) contrasted the ‘white' bourgeois narrative of infantile development with a tale of loss and deprivation. Their conventional narrative patterns constructed Africa as a pastoral idyll; Rousseauian ideas of innate goodness were combined with the topos of the noble savage. White abolitionists, too, turned the black orphan child into a sentimental icon; examples can be found in the writings of James Montgomery, Ann Taylor, Thomas Clarkson, Laurence Sterne and William Blake. Eighteenth-century educational and colonial policies were articulated in markedly similar terms; infantile and lower-class "ignorance” was juxtaposed with the mental "darkness” of the colonial subject. The article ends with a look at a late-twentieth-century transformation of the ‘slave child' motif, David Dabydeen's novel A Harlot's Progress (1999), which focuses on the figure of the black slave child in the second picture of William Hogarth's eponymous cycle of paintings (1732). The novel discusses the problem of the narrative construction of ‘black childhood' itself, rewriting the eighteenth-century sentimental tradition in postmodernist fashion © 2014 by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik De Gruyter 52/2(2004-04), 107-120 52:2<107 2004 52 zaa https://doi.org/10.1515/zaa.2004.52.2.107 text/html Onlinezugriff via DOI 1 research article jats NATIONALLICENCE 856 40 https://doi.org/10.1515/zaa.2004.52.2.107 text/html Onlinezugriff via DOI NATIONALLICENCE 100 1- Zwierlein Anne-Julia NATIONALLICENCE 773 0- Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik De Gruyter 52/2(2004-04), 107-120 52:2<107 2004 52 zaa CC0 http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0 nationallicence BK010053 XK010053 XK010000 NATIONALLICENCE NATIONALLICENCE NL-gruyter