This book is a significant contribution to existing research on the themes of race and slavery in the founding literature of the United States. It extends the boundaries of existing research by locating race and slavery within a transnational and 'oceanic' framework.The author applies critical concepts developed within postcolonial theory to American texts written between the national emergence of the United States and the Civil War, in order to uncover metaphors of the colonial and...

The sea has been the site of radical changes in human lives and national histories. It has been an agent of colonial oppression but also of indigenous resistance, a site of loss, dispersal and enforced migration but also of new forms of solidarity and affective kinship. Sea**Changes re-evaluates the view that history happens mainly on dry land and makes the case for a creative reinterpretation of the role of the sea: not merely as a passage from one country to the next, but a hist...

The book is divided into two broad sections: In Slavery and Freedom, which features critical research on slavery and post-emancipation society, and Gender Paradigms.

It would be easy to assume that, in the eighteenth century, slavery and the culture of taste--the world of politeness, manners, and aesthetics--existed as separate and unequal domains, unrelated in the spheres of social life. But to the contrary, Slavery and the Culture of Taste demonstrates that these two areas of modernity were surprisingly entwined. Ranging across Britain, the antebellum South, and the West Indies, and examining vast archives, including portraits, period painti...

Essays on Melville and the culture of the Pacific“Like the young Melville, those who imagine Polynesia from the perspective of Europe or North America tend to envision a tropical garden set in a shining sea. But the Pacific experienced by a runaway American sailor in an earlier century presents a different picture, and the Pacifi c experienced by indigenous peoples of today a different one yet.”— from the IntroductionHerman Melville had a lifelong fascination with ...

From the seventeenth century into the nineteenth, thousands of Madagascar’s people were brought to American ports as slaves. In Memories of Madagascar and Slavery in the Black Atlantic, Wendy Wilson-Fall shows that the descendants of these Malagasy slaves in the United States maintained an ethnic identity in ways that those from the areas more commonly feeding the Atlantic slave trade did not. Generations later, hundreds, if not thousands, of African Americans maintain strong iden...

An ambitious global history that fundamentally alters our understanding of MalthusThe New Worlds of Thomas Robert Malthus is a sweeping global and intellectual history that radically recasts our understanding of Malthus's Essay on the Principle of Population, the most famous book on population ever written or ever likely to be. Malthus's Essay is also persistently misunderstood. First published anonymously in 1798, the Essay syst...

With long, solitary periods at sea, far from literary and cultural centers, sailors comprise a remarkable population of readers and writers. Although their contributions have been little recognized in literary history, seamen were important figures in the nineteenth-century American literary sphere. In the first book to explore their unique contribution to literary culture, Hester Blum examines the first-person narratives of working sailors, from little-known sea tales to more famous works...

Looking at a diverse series of authors--Herman Melville, Richard Henry Dana, Jr., Mark Twain, Charles Warren Stoddard, and Jack London--"The Colonizer Abroad" claims that as the U.S. emerged as a colonial power in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the literature of the sea became a literature of imperialism. This book applies postcolonial theory to the travel writing of some of America's best-known authors, revealing the ways in which America's travel fiction and nonfiction have both...

Soon Come Home to This Island traces the representation of West Indian characters in British children's literature from 1700 to today. This book challenges traditional notions of British children's literature as mono-cultural by illuminating the contributions of colonial and postcolonial-era Black British writers. The author examines the varying depictions of West Indian islands and peoples in a wide range of picture books, novels, textbooks, and popular periodicals published over...

Rooted in a period of vigorous exploration and colonialism, The Island Race: Englishness, empire and gender in the eighteenth century is an innovative study of the issues of nation, gender and identity. Wilson bases her analysis on a wide range of case studies drawn both from Britain and across the Atlantic and Pacific worlds.Creating a colourful and original colonial landscape, she considers topics such as:sodomytheatremasculinity

Exploring the ways in which transatlantic relationships functioned in the nineteenth century to unsettle hierarchical models of gender, race, and national and cultural differences, this collection demonstrates the generative potential of transatlantic studies to loosen demographic frames and challenge conveniently linear histories. The contributors take up a rich and varied range of topics, including Charlotte Smith's novelistic treatment of the American Revolution, The Old Manor House; An...