that wrote the narratives are considered as historians, since "memory and history come together". These accounts link elements of the slave's personal life and destiny with key historical phenomena, such as the American Civil War and the Underground Railroad. In simple, yet powerful storylines, slave narratives follow in general a plot common to all of them: starting from the initial situation, the slave in his master's home, the protagonist escapes in the wilderness and narrates the struggle for survival and recognition throughout his uncertain journey to freedom. After all, these narratives were written retrospectively by freed slaves and/or their abolitionist advocate, hence the focus on the transformation from the dehumanized slave to the self-emancipated free man. This change often entailed literacy as a means to overcome captivity, as the case of Frederick Douglass highlights. The narratives are very graphic to the extent as extensive accounts of e.g. whipping, abuse and rape of enslaved women are exposed in detail (see Treatment of slaves in the United States). The denunciation of the slave owners, in particular their cruelty and hypocrisy, is a recurring theme in slave narratives, and in some examples took a comic stance denouncing the double standards (e.g. in Douglass's narrative, his slave owner Hopkins is a very religious, but also brutal man). According to James Olney, a typical outline looks the following way: There is no consensus about what exact type of literature slave narratives are, whether they can be considered as a proper genre, comprised in the large category captivity narrative, or are autobiographies, memoirs, testimonials, or novels; nonetheless, they play a big part in keeping up the memory of slavery and in approaching a topic that was considered as a taboo for a long time – especially since many denied and still deny the existence of slavery. Given the participation in the 19th century of abolitionist editors (at least in the United States), influential early 20th-century historians, such as Ulrich B. Phillips in 1929, suggested that, as a class, "their authenticity was doubtful". These doubts have been criticized following better academic research of these narratives, since the late 20th-century historians have more often validated the accounts of slaves about their own experiences. North American slave narratives Slave narratives by African slaves from North America were first published in England in the 18th century. They soon became the main form of African-American literature in the 19th century. Slave