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This article asks what we might learn by attending to the form of Olaudah Equiano’s Interesting Narrative. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. first took seriously the structure and tropes of Equiano’s work, but Vincent Carretta’s famous questions about Equiano's birthplace have eclipsed other lines of inquiry. Suggesting that there is much we have missed in the Interesting Narrative in this turn away from form, I argue that a counterplot runs through the text, one shaped through textual clusters I refer to (using Equiano’s keyword) as “trifles.” In this counterplot Equiano expresses thoughts and emotions not containable within contemporary abolitionist discourse.

This essay examines the pre- and posthistory of The Interesting Narrative of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African (1789). Opening with a reconsideration of Vincent Carretta's influential claim that Equiano fabricated an African birthplace, I consider how Equiano's strategies of self-fashioning inform his trailblazing book tour of the British Isles in the early 1790s. If Equiano self-consciously designed his autobiography to become a best seller, his book tour performed the abolitionist manifesto that he was reluctant to put into print, as during his stops at cities and towns across the nation he worked to convert sympathetic readers into active abolitionists. Under the long shadow of the Pitt ministry's suppression of political activism in the 1790s, Equiano formed alliances with working-class and radical figures in Britain and Ireland, drawing on Shakespeare's Othello to develop a familiar public persona he could market during his book tour. (JB)

John Bugg studies the relationship between language, alterity, and empire in two of Frankenstein’s narratives of education: the education of the Creature, and the (other) education of Victor Frankenstein. That the Creature’s realization of his alterity is consubstantial with his encounters with scenes of reading particularly evokes the “Trope of the Talking Book” passages of ex-slave writers James Gronniosaw and Olaudah Equiano. Shelley expands the Creature’s education in his own alterity into a broader education in imperial history, so that the Creature begins to find community with the displaced victims of empire. It is this education in exile, Bugg argues, that also constitutes the Creature’s revenge: he determines to have Frankenstein learn not only what it means to be “cut off from all the world,” but also, like the Creature, to read the language that names his own exile. 666 john bugg This content downloaded from 207.46.13.51 on Sun, 19 Jun 2016 06:23:33 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms