Bachelor of English

Bachelor of English

Truong Dang Khoa, B.A tdkhoa.grad@gmail.com
English Studies & Literature Class, C33
Department of Foreign Languages
Can Tho University
3/2 Street, Can Tho City, Vietnam

The nineteenth century experienced the Second Industrial Revolution mostly based in America, which created a variety of great advances contributing to the course of human civilization. However, the history of the contemporary American society, a class-based society, has trenchantly proved that the nature of those so-called achievements is merely a blurred curtain covering the dark side of the slavery-institutionalized states. Together with the history, the then literary works can be considered as records that excessively expose the inhumanity of the chattel slavery system. The remarkable examples for anti-slavery writings can be mentioned such as “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” by Harriet Beecher Stowe, “Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass” by Frederick Douglass and “Beloved” by Toni Marrison. While sharing the same source of inspiration about the condemnation of the slavery institution’s heinous crime, the three authors all have their distinctive voices to express their viewpoints on the evil of slavery, the destiny of black slaves and their own pathways to the world of freedom.

Robert E. Lee – the Confederate General in the American Civil War - once said, “There are few, I believe, in this enlightened age, who will not acknowledge that slavery as an institution is a moral and political evil”. That statement presents the brutally immortal existence of slavery in the minds of those who used to experience it. On account of the different experiences of the writers, slavery might be viewed and reflected through dissimilar lenses, yet after all, the mentioned works of literature all target at disclosing the horrors and moral contradictions of slavery. In whatever forms slavery exists, it contains anti-humanitarian thoughts and deeds in...

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