Freedom's empire : race and the rise of the novel in Atlantic modernity, 1640-1940 / Laura Doyle.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Doyle, Laura (Laura Anne)

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

American fiction--History and criticism.

American fiction.

English fiction--History and criticism.

English fiction.

Race in literature.

Liberty in literature.

Modernism (Literature).

Physical Description:

xii, 578 pages ; 25 cm

Place of Publication:

Durham : Duke University Press, 2008.

Summary:

In this pathbreaking work of scholarship, Laura Doyle reveals the central, formative role of race in the development of a transnational, English-language literature over three centuries. Identifying a recurring freedom plot organized around an Atlantic Ocean crossing, Doyle shows how this plot structures the texts of both African-Atlantic and Anglo-Atlantic writers and how it takes shape by way of submerged intertextual exchanges between the two traditions. For Anglo-Atlantic writers, Doyle locates the origins of this narrative in the seventeenth century. She argues that members of Parliament, religious refugees, and new Atlantic merchants together generated a racial rhetoric by which the English fashioned themselves as a "native," "freedom-loving," "Anglo-Saxon" people struggling against a tyrannical foreign king. Stories of a near ruinous yet triumphant Atlantic passage to freedom came to provide the narrative expression of this heroic Anglo-Saxon identity-in novels, memoirs, pamphlets, and national histories. At the same time, as Doyle traces through figures such as Friday in Robinson Crusoe, and through gothic and seduction narratives of ruin and captivity, these texts covertly register, distort, or appropriate the black Atlantic experience. African-Atlantic authors seize back the freedom plot, placing their agency at the origin of both their own and whites' survival on the Atlantic. They also shrewdly expose the ways that their narratives have been "framed" by the Anglo-Atlantic tradition, even though their labor has provided the enabling condition for that tradition.

Contents:

Atlantic horizon, interior turn: seventeenth-century racial revolution

Liberty's historiography: James Harrington to Mercy Otis Warren

The poetics of liberty and the racial sublime

Entering Atlantic history: Oroonoko, Imoinda, and Behn

Rape as entry into liberty: Haywood and Richardson

Transatlantic seductions: Defoe, Rowson, Brown, and Wilson

Middle-passage plots: Defoe, Equiano, Melville

At liberty's limits: Walpole and Lewis

Saxon dissociation in Brockden Brown

Dispossession in Jacobs and Hopkins

Freedom by removal in Sedgwick

"A" for Atlantic in Hawthorne

Freedom's eastward turn in Eliot's Daniel Deronda

Trickster epic in Hopkins's contending forces

Queering freedom's theft in Nella Larsen

Woolf's queer Atlantic oeuvre.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages [507]-553) and index.

ISBN:

9780822341352

0822341352

9780822341598

082234159X

OCLC:

166255103