스탠필드의 『기니 항해』: 노예무역과 노예선 그리고 고통의 심연

Abstract

In spite of its importance as an anti-slavery poem, J. F. Stanfield’s The Guinea Voyage has not received enough critical attention. The poem deserves more attention because it makes a most strong critique of slave trade and the growing wealth ensuing from it while most of eighteenth and nineteenth-century English writers kept their silence on the issue. Based on his experience of working on a slave ship, Stanfield realistically describes the horror of slave trade and the suffering of slaves captured, thereby eloquently voicing for the abolition of slave trade. The Guinea Voyage does not just document the details of slave trade. Rather, as a literary work, it brings out people on the most extreme stage of slave ship and asks a fundamental question which the contemporary English society tends to neglect, that is, what human beings should do about the sufferings of other people. For this reason, Stanfield and The Guinea Voyage should be given greater consideration as an important work of eighteenth-century English literature. (Hannam University)