Empire of neglect: Caribbean literature, British liberalism, and New World asylums, 1776--1888.

Format:

Book

Thesis/Dissertation

Author/Creator:

Taylor, Chris (Christopher J.)

Contributor:

University of Pennsylvania. English.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

English literature.

Irish literature.

British literature.

American literature.

Latin America--Research.

Latin America.

Research.

Caribbean literature.

0360.

0550.

0591.

0593.

Local Subjects:

0360.

0550.

0591.

0593.

Physical Description:

442 pages

Contained In:

Dissertation Abstracts International 73-09A(E).

System Details:

Mode of access: World Wide Web.

text file

Summary:

"Empire of Neglect" explores the economic, political, and cultural processes that led nineteenth-century British West Indian writers to conceive of themselves as citizens of the hemispheric Americas. I locate these conditions in the long-term process of liberalization that transformed the British Empire from a mercantilist system subtended by slave production into an empire of free trade. "Empire of Neglect" examines the political grammars by which creole writers articulated their discontent with the dissolution of the mercantilist state. Decrying the political economy of the time as "anti-colonial" and "neglectful," creoles critiqued what they understood as the collapse of the British Empire by turning to literary and quasi-literary genres to figure and model anti-liberal modalities of political community. I argue that British West Indian literature drew on New World literary sources to contest the transformation of the British Empire into a zone of merely economic relationships and to depict the New World as an asylum from the economistic calculations that left the islands' effectively excluded from the empire. Through readings of published texts (such as Michel Maxwell Philip's Emmanuel Appadocca [1854], Mary Seacole's Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands [1857], the anonymously published Adolphus [1853], and Matthew Higgins pamphlets) as well as archival material (such as the short-lived newspaper The Trinidadian), I demonstrate that creoles sought cultural citizenship in the Americas as compensation for the imperial citizenship they felt themselves to have lost.

Notes:

Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 73-09(E), Section: A.

Adviser: David Kazanjian.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Pennsylvania, 2012.

Local Notes:

School code: 0175.

ISBN:

9781267359995

Access Restriction:

Restricted for use by site license.