“[I]nvigorate[s] the Atlantic as a category of literary and cultural study<br />in the West. In an effort to reconceptualize the abstract idea of freedom in the Atlantic world, Doyle demonstrates something fundamental to modern liberty—that at its foundation, it is a race myth. . . . <i>Freedom’s Empire </i>generates crucial questions and insights that substantively complicate the intellectual invention of Atlantic modernity and its literary history.” - Christopher C. Freeburg, <i>American Literature</i>

“<i>Freedom's Empire</i> is the most ambitious study of the novel and empire since Edward Said's <i>Culture and Imperialism</i>. . . . <i>Freedom's Empire</i> is a provocative history of the simultaneous articulation of race, freedom and empire in English-language literary and political practice.” - Corey Capers, <i>Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History</i>

“<i>Freedom’s Empire</i> offers a unique perspective on Atlantic modernity. . . . Doyle shows that challenging the prevailing structures of literary criticism is imperative to a more nuanced understanding of what in an earlier collection Doyle termed ‘geomodernisms’. . . . Doyle’s study succeeds in its argument. . . . Impressively written and wide in scope, <i>Freedom’s Empire</i> shows persuasively how ‘novels and histories became partners in the project of narrativizing racial liberty.’” - Marisa Huerta,<i> African American Review</i>

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“Laura Doyle’s project in <i>Freedom’s Empire</i> is nothing short of upending the ways in which we have grown accustomed to reading, writing, and talking about the development of the English-language novel. It is an ambitious project, to say the least, and yet one in which Doyle is entirely successful. This is one of the most exciting literary studies’ interventions I have encountered in a long time, and my guess is that it will further alter the way in which we think about the seemingly discrete categories of the British and American novel. . . . This is a remarkable book, one that I would encourage any scholar of the novel in English to make space for on his or her bookshelf.” - Sarah Gleeson-White, <i>Rocky Mountain Review</i>

“<i>Freedom’s Empire</i> is a bold, exciting book. Laura Doyle shows how the call to move past the framing terms of nation and historical period will result in different readings not only of novels but also of the issues with which they engage. She demonstrates how challenging the structures of literary criticism can lead to a new transatlantic cultural history.”—<b>Priscilla Wald</b>, author of <i>Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative</i>

“<i>Freedom’s Empire</i> is a truly excellent work of scholarship, an important contribution to the study of the English-language novel, and a significant addition to the critical examination of the deep and varying entanglements of the discourses of race and modernity. It vitally enriches the growing field of Atlantic literary studies and will, I suspect, become one of the keystone texts of that field.”—<b>Ian Baucom</b>, author of <i>Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History</i>

“Laura Doyle’s study provides a powerful and persuasive historical ‘Atlantic world’ recontextualization of the dialectical relation of African American and Anglo-American narrative traditions. This imaginative reframing complicates and deepens our understanding of the ‘Black Atlantic’ and energizes her readings of black authors, including Pauline Hopkins, Nella Larsen, and others.”—<b>Kevin K. Gaines</b>, author of <i>American Africans in Ghana: Black Expatriates and the Civil Rights Era</i>

“<i>Freedom’s Empire</i> offers a unique perspective on Atlantic modernity. . . . Doyle shows that challenging the prevailing structures of literary criticism is imperative to a more nuanced understanding of what in an earlier collection Doyle termed ‘geomodernisms’. . . . Doyle’s study succeeds in its argument. . . . Impressively written and wide in scope, <i>Freedom’s Empire</i> shows persuasively how ‘novels and histories became partners in the project of narrativizing racial liberty.’”

- Marisa Huerta, African American Review

“<i>Freedom's Empire</i> is the most ambitious study of the novel and empire since Edward Said's <i>Culture and Imperialism</i>. . . . <i>Freedom's Empire</i> is a provocative history of the simultaneous articulation of race, freedom and empire in English-language literary and political practice.”

- Corey Capers, Journal of Colonialism & Colonial History

“[I]nvigorate[s] the Atlantic as a category of literary and cultural study in the West. In an effort to reconceptualize the abstract idea of freedom in the Atlantic world, Doyle demonstrates something fundamental to modern liberty—that at its foundation, it is a race myth. . . . <i>Freedom’s Empire </i>generates crucial questions and insights that substantively complicate the intellectual invention of Atlantic modernity and its literary history.”

- Christopher C. Freeburg, American Literature

“Laura Doyle’s project in <i>Freedom’s Empire</i> is nothing short of upending the ways in which we have grown accustomed to reading, writing, and talking about the development of the English-language novel. It is an ambitious project, to say the least, and yet one in which Doyle is entirely successful. This is one of the most exciting literary studies’ interventions I have encountered in a long time, and my guess is that it will further alter the way in which we think about the seemingly discrete categories of the British and American novel. . . . This is a remarkable book, one that I would encourage any scholar of the novel in English to make space for on his or her bookshelf.”

- Sarah Gleeson-White, Rocky Mountain Review

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.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.
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A sweeping argument that from the mid-seventeenth century until the mid-twentieth, the English-language novel encoded ideas equating race with liberty.
Acknowledgments xi Introduction 1 I. Race and Liberty in the Atlantic Economy 1. Atlantic Horizon, Interior Turn: Seventeenth-Century Racial Revolution 27 2. Liberty’s Historiography: James Harrington to Mercy Otis Warrren 57 3. The Poetics of Liberty and the Racial Sublime 79 II. Founding Fictions of Liberty 4. Entering Atlantic History: Oroonoko, Imoinda, and Behn 97 5. Rape as Entry into Liberty: Haywood and Richardson 118 6. Transatlantic Seductions: Defoe, Rowson, Brown, and Wilson 145 7. Middle-Passage Plots: Defoe, Equiano, Melville 183 III. Atlantic Gothic 8. At Liberty’s Limits: Walpole and Lewis 215 9. Saxon Dissociation in Brockdon Brown 231 10. Dispossession in Jacobs and Hopkins 255 IV. Liberty as Race Epic 11. Freedom by Removal in Sedgwick 277 12. “A” for Atlantic in Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter 301 13. Freedom’s Eastward Turn in Eliot’s Daniel Deronda 311 14. Trickster Epic in Hopkin’s Contending Forces 369 V. Liberty’s Ruin in Atlantic Modernism 15. Queering Freedom’s Theft in Nella Larsen 393 16. Woolf’s Queer Atlantic Oeuvre 413 Conclusion 445 Notes 455 Bibliography 507 Index 555
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Major new history of the novel in English, showing how central interlocking notions of race and freedom have been to the genre over a 300 year period

Produktdetaljer

ISBN
9780822341598
Publisert
2008-01-11
Utgiver
Vendor
Duke University Press
Vekt
812 gr
Høyde
235 mm
Bredde
156 mm
AldersnivĂĽ
P, 06
SprĂĽk
Product language
Engelsk
Format
Product format
Heftet

Forfatter

Om bidragsyterne

Laura Doyle is Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She is the author of Bordering on the Body: The Racial Matrix of Modern Fiction and Culture; editor of Bodies of Resistance: New Phenomenologies of Politics, Agency, and Culture; and coeditor of Geomodernisms: Race, Modernism, Modernity.