Freedoms Empire

by Doyle, Laura

• ISBN13: 9780822341598
• ISBN10: 082234159X
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2008-02-28
• Publisher: Duke Univ Pr

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 inRobinson 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 whitesrs" 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.Doyle brings together authors often separated by nation, race, and period, including Aphra Behn, Eliza Haywood, Olaudah Equiano, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Harriet Wilson, Pauline Hopkins, George Eliot, and Nella Larsen. In so doing, she reassesses the strategies of early women novelists, reinterprets the significance of rape and incest in the novel, and measures the power of race in the modern English-language imagination.

Author Biography

Laura Doyle is Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	p. xi
Introduction	p. 1
Race and Liberty in the Atlantic Economy
Atlantic Horizon, Intrior Turn: Seventeenth-Century Racial Revolution	p. 27
Liberty's Historiography: James Harrington to Mercy Otis Warren	p. 57
The Poetics of Liberty and the Racial Sublime	p. 79
Founding Fictions of Liberty
Entering Atlantic History: Oroonoko, Imoinda, and Behn	p. 97
Rape as Entry into Liberty: Haywood and Richardson	p. 118
Transatlantic Seductions: Defoe, Rowson, Brown, and Wilson	p. 145
Middle-Passage Plots: Defoe, Equiano, Melville	p. 183
Atlantic Gothic
At Liberty's Limits: Walpole and Lewis	p. 215
Saxon Dissociation in Brockden Brown	p. 231
Dispossession in Jacobs and Hopkins	p. 255
Liberty as Race Epic
Freedom by Removal in Sedgwick	p. 277
"A" for Atlantic in Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter	p. 301
Freedom's Eastward Turn in Eliot's Daniel Deronda	p. 331
Trickster Epic in Hopkins's Contending Forces	p. 369
Liberty's Ruin in Atlantic Modernism
Queering Freedom's Theft in Nella Larsen	p. 393
Woolf's Queer Atlantic Oeuvre	p. 413
Conclusion	p. 445
Notes	p. 455
Bibliography	p. 507
Index	p. 555
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