Affect and Abolition in the Anglo-Atlantic, 1770 1830

ISBN-13: 9781138276635 / Angielski / Miękka / 2016 / 236 str.

Stephen Ahern

Opis

This collection investigates the rhetorical features and political complexities of the culture of sentimentality as it grappled with the material realities of transatlantic slavery at the turn of the nineteenth century. The contributors examine poetry, plays, petitions, treatises and life-writing that engaged with contemporary debates about abolition.

Spis treści

Contents: Introduction: The bonds of sentiment, Stephen Ahern; Part 1 Sympathy’s Empire: Capitalism and slavery, once again with feeling, George Boulukos; Acts of sympathy: abolitionist poetry and transatlantic identification, Tobias Menely. Part 2 Nation, Narration, Emancipation: Commerce, sentiment, and free air: contradictions of abolitionist rhetoric, Anthony John Harding; Sympathy, nerve physiology, and national degeneration in Anna Letitia Barbauld’s Epistle to William Wilberforce, Mary A. Waters. Part 3 Spectacles of Suffering: To force a tear: British abolitionism and the 18th-century stage, Brycchan Carey; ’Pity for the poor Africans’: William Cowper and the limits of abolitionist affect, Joanne Tong; ’We beg Your Excellency’: the sentimental politics of abolitionist petitions in the late 18th century, Christine Levecq. Part 4 Sentimental Bondage: The contradictions of racialized sensibility: gender, slavery and the limits of sympathy, Jamie Rosenthal; The cruelty of slavery, the cruelty of freedom: colonization and the politics of humaneness in the early republic, Margaret Abruzzo; Selected bibliography; Index.

O autorze

Stephen Ahern is Associate Professor of English at Acadia University, Nova Scotia, Canada.