Between Morality and the Marketplace: Literary Celebrity and the Transatlantic Anti-Slavery Movement

Simon Morgan discusses the tensions within the transatlantic anti-slavery movement between literary celebrity and moral responsibility. Simon Morgan (Leeds Beckett University) examines these tensions through the contrasting cases of Frederick Douglass and Harriet Beecher Stowe: the former trying to use his status as an ex-slave and anti-slavery orator to promote himself as an author, the latter using her status as international literary celebrity to claim authority as a spokeswoman against slavery. For both literature was an avenue through which they could intervene effectively in political debate and construct their public personae.