Fictions of the Black Atlantic in American Foundational Literature

ISBN-13: 9780415333023 / Angielski / Twarda / 2004 / 240 str.

Gesa Mackenthun; G. Mackenthun;Mackenthun Gesa

Opis

Inspired by recent postcolonial fictional reinventions of the history of the Black Atlantic, and employing the critical tools of colonial discourse analysis, this book examines a nineteenth century 'postcolonial' corpus - texts written between the emergence of the United States as a nation and the Civil War. The texts considered witness a growing unease about the issue of slavery and the slave trade that erupted in the Civil War in 1861. Many of the texts have the ocean as their setting and 'negotiate' the complex and ambivalent relationship of 'postcolonial' America to Atlantic commerce and the transatlantic slave trade.

Spis treści

1. Chartless Narratives: Ambivalent Postcoloniality and Oceanic Memory in Early American Writing
2. The Emergence of the 'Postcolonial' Atlantic: Equiano's Narrative and Tyler's Algerine Captive
3. Textual and Geographical Displacement in Arthur Mervyn and The Red Rover
4. Ambivalent Atlantic: Slaveship Memories in Antebellum Writing
5. Metaphorical Atlantic: Antebellum Fictions of the Pacific

O autorze

Gesa Mackenthun is Professor of American Studies at Rostock University, Germany. Her books include an analysis of early modern colonial discourse, Metaphors of Dispossession (1997), and a forthcoming collection of essays, co-edited with Bernhard Klein, on the history of oceans, Sea Changes: Historicizing the Ocean. Her main work is in the fields of American Studies, colonial discourse and postcolonial theory