Slavery, Empathy, and Pornography

by Wood, Marcus

• ISBN13: 9780198187202
• ISBN10: 0198187203
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2003-02-06
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

This study considers the operations of slavery and of abolition propaganda on the thought and literature of England from the late-eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries. Incorporating materials ranging from canonical literatures to the lowest form of street publication, Marcus Wood writes from the conviction that slavery was, and still is, a dilemma for everyone in England, and seeks to explain why English society has constructed Atlantic slavery in the way it has.

Author Biography

Marcus Wood is a Reader in English and American Studies, at the University of Sussex.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements	v
List of Plates	viii
Introduction	1	(22)
Slavery, Testimony, Propaganda: John Newton, William Cowper, and Compulsive Confession	23	(64)
Slavery, Empathy, and Pornography in John Gabriel Stedman's Narrative of a Five Years Expedition Against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam	87	(54)
William Cobbett, John Thelwall: Radicalism, Racism, and Slavery	141	(40)
Slavery and Romantic Poetry	181	(74)
`Born to be a destroyer of slavery': Harriet Martineau, Fixing Slavery and Slavery as a Fix	255	(40)
Canons to the Right of them, Canons to the Left of them: Mansfield Park, Jane Eyre, and Memorial Subversions of Slavery	295	(51)
The Anatomy of Bigotry: Carlyle, Ruskin, Slavery, and a New Language of Race	346	(52)
Conclusion	398	(30)
Bibliography	428	(29)
Index	457