Slavery and the Romantic Imagination

Portada
University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017 M09 14 - 312 páginas

Selected by Choice magazine as an Outstanding Academic Title

The Romantic movement had profound social implications for nineteenth-century British culture. Among the most significant, Debbie Lee contends, was the change it wrought to insular Britons' ability to distance themselves from the brutalities of chattel slavery. In the broadest sense, she asks what the relationship is between the artist and the most hideous crimes of his or her era. In dealing with the Romantic period, this question becomes more specific: what is the relationship between the nation's greatest writers and the epic violence of slavery? In answer, Slavery and the Romantic Imagination provides a fully historicized and theorized account of the intimate relationship between slavery, African exploration, "the Romantic imagination," and the literary works produced by this conjunction.

Though the topics of race, slavery, exploration, and empire have come to shape literary criticism and cultural studies over the past two decades, slavery has, surprisingly, not been widely examined in the most iconic literary texts of nineteenth-century Britain, even though emancipation efforts coincide almost exactly with the Romantic movement. This study opens up new perspectives on Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Shelley, Keats, and Mary Prince by setting their works in the context of political writings, antislavery literature, medicinal tracts, travel writings, cartography, ethnographic treatises, parliamentary records, philosophical papers, and iconography.

Dentro del libro

Contenido

British Slavery and African Exploration The Written Legacy
11
The Distanced Imagination
29
Hazards and Horrors in the Slave Colonies
45
Distant Diseases Yellow Fever in Coleridges The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
47
Intimacy as Imitation Monkeys in Blakes Engravings for Stedmans Narrative
66
Fascination and Fear in Africa
121
African Embraces Voodoo and Possession in Keatss Lamia
123
Mapping Interiors African Cartography Nile Poetry and Percy Bysshe Shelleys The Witch of Atlas
142
Proximitys Monsters Ethnography and AntiSlavery Law in Mary Shelleys Frankenstein
171
Intimate Distance African Women and Infant Death in Wordsworths Poetry and The History of Mary Prince
194
Afterword
223
Notes
225
Selected Bibliography
263
Index
285
Acknowledgments
295
Derechos de autor

Facing Slavery in Britain
169

Otras ediciones - Ver todas

Términos y frases comunes

Pasajes populares

Página 32 - The great secret of morals is love ; or a going out of our own nature, and an identification of ourselves with the beautiful which exists in thought, action, or person, not our own. A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively ; he must put himself in the place of another and of many others ; the pains and pleasures of his species must become his own.
Página 58 - The steersman's face by his lamp gleamed white; From the sails the dew did drip Till clomb above the eastern bar The horned Moon, with one bright star Within the nether tip. One after one, by the star-dogged Moon, Too quick for groan or sigh, Each turned his face with a ghastly pang, And cursed me with his eye. Four times fifty living men, (And I heard nor sigh nor groan) With heavy thump, a lifeless lump, They dropped down one by one. The souls did from their bodies fly, They fled to bliss or woe!...
Página 64 - O happy living things ! no tongue Their beauty might declare: A spring of love gushed from my heart, And I blessed them unaware: Sure my kind saint took pity on me, And I blessed them unaware.
Página 65 - By thy long grey beard and glittering eye, Now wherefore stopp'st thou me? 'The Bridegroom's doors are opened wide, And I am next of kin; The guests are met, the feast is set: May'st hear the merry din.
Página 100 - Lord, and set me down in the midst of the valley which was full of bones ; and caused me to pass by them round about ; and, behold, there were very many in the open valley ; and, lo, they were very dry. And he said unto me, Son of man, can these bones live ? And I answered, O Lord God, thou knowest.
Página 152 - At this moment, painful as my reflections were, the extraordinary beauty of a small moss, in fructification, irresistibly caught my eye. I mention this, to show from what trifling circumstances the mind will sometimes derive consolation ; for, though the whole plant was not larger than the top of one of my fingers, I could not contemplate the delicate conformation of its roots, leaves, and capsula, without admiration. Can that Being...
Página 35 - Though our brother is upon the rack, as long as we ourselves are at our ease, our senses will never inform us of what he suffers. They never did, and never can, carry us beyond our own person, and it is by the imagination only that we can form any conception of what are his sensations.
Página 24 - The winds roared, and the rains fell. The poor white man, faint and weary, came and sat under our tree. He has no mother to bring him milk; no wife to grind his corn.
Página 32 - So that it will be the wish of the Poet to bring his feelings near to those of the persons whose feelings he describes, nay, for short spaces of time, perhaps, to let himself slip into an entire delusion, and even confound and identify his own feelings with theirs...
Página 26 - In spite of difference of soil and climate, of language and manners, of laws and customs: in spite of things silently gone out of mind, and things violently destroyed; the Poet binds together by passion and knowledge the vast empire of human society, as it is spread over the whole earth, and over all time.

Acerca del autor (2017)

Debbie Lee teaches English at Washington State University. She is general editor (with Peter Kitson) of the eight-volume work Slavery, Abolition, and Emancipation: Writings in the British Romantic Period.

Información bibliográfica