From the outset of his public career, Douglass was confronted with the dilemma of representation in the complex social, cultural and political milieu of the nineteenth-century Atlantic world. His early trip to Ireland, and the changes to the Narrative that he implemented there, signal his first major reconfiguration of the anti-slavery debate. The central fiction of the narrative, the slave subject, is repositioned within an international Atlantic, rather than insular US discourse of western modernity. The Irish Narratives become the expressive locus of Douglass's economic success, social mobility and increasing ideological independence. They also mark his alliance with feminized political spaces of comparable class and moral intention, an alliance that was to continue throughout his career.

In this, Douglass's work was instrumental in consolidating a transnational ethical culture committed to liberal, Anglo-American values and the principles that underpinned them. Conversely, the preface to the new texts becomes the site of a counter-discourse, which posits slavery as the result of colonial process, though the radicalism of that position was soon to be lost with the emergence of Douglass's unequivocal Anglophilia. The Narratives also demonstrate the agency of the slave-subject in mediating images of the United States in an international context, and, indeed, Douglass's power over the economic and ideological success of transatlantic abolitionism.