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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