Black Writers in Britain: 1760-1890.

In a 1985 essay, Paul Edwards argued that British students (and most of their teachers) remain ignorant of eighteenth-and nineteenth-century black writers, a situation requiring redress, "if only to dispel the idea that black people have in the past simply been written about, and have not spoken for themselves." That essay appeared in The Black Presence in English Literature, edited by David Dabydeen. Now Edwards and Dabydeen have united to provide a remedy in Black Writers in Britain 1760-1890, a textbook for school and university students. In 240 pages they seek to introduce nineteen writers who flourished during a century and a half; within such limits, they have created an …