African-British Writings in the Eighteenth Century

African-British Writings in the Eighteenth Century PDF Author: Helena Woodard
Publisher: Praeger
ISBN:
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 216

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Book Description
The eighteenth century was a time of great cultural change in Britain. It was a period of exploration, in which adventurers journeyed to the New World, Africa, and the Orient, and these voyages were reflected in contemporary travel literature. It was also a period in which seventeenth-century empiricism and the scientific method became dominant, and in which society became increasingly secular. Fundamental to the eighteenth-century worldview was the prominence of the Great Chain of Being, in which all creatures and their Creator stood in a hierarchical relationship to one another. With voyages to Africa becoming more common, blacks were brought to Britain as slaves. These Africans living in Britain sometimes wrote about their place in society, and Whites debated the place of the black slaves within the hierarchy of the universe. This book examines representations of blacks in British literature to illuminate how society viewed blacks during the eighteenth century. Included are discussions of major canonical writers such as Pope, Swift, and Sterne, along with discussions of works by African-British writers such as James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw, Quobna Ottobah Cugoano, Olaudah Equiano, and Mary Prince.

African-British Writings in the Eighteenth Century

African-British Writings in the Eighteenth Century PDF Author: Helena Woodard
Publisher: Praeger
ISBN:
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 216

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Book Description
The eighteenth century was a time of great cultural change in Britain. It was a period of exploration, in which adventurers journeyed to the New World, Africa, and the Orient, and these voyages were reflected in contemporary travel literature. It was also a period in which seventeenth-century empiricism and the scientific method became dominant, and in which society became increasingly secular. Fundamental to the eighteenth-century worldview was the prominence of the Great Chain of Being, in which all creatures and their Creator stood in a hierarchical relationship to one another. With voyages to Africa becoming more common, blacks were brought to Britain as slaves. These Africans living in Britain sometimes wrote about their place in society, and Whites debated the place of the black slaves within the hierarchy of the universe. This book examines representations of blacks in British literature to illuminate how society viewed blacks during the eighteenth century. Included are discussions of major canonical writers such as Pope, Swift, and Sterne, along with discussions of works by African-British writers such as James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw, Quobna Ottobah Cugoano, Olaudah Equiano, and Mary Prince.

Measuring the Moment

Measuring the Moment PDF Author: Keith Albert Sandiford
Publisher: Susquehanna University Press
ISBN: 9780941664790
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 196

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Book Description
This work closely analyzes and evaluates the literary achievement and the sociopolitical impact of three eighteenth-century Anglo-African authors -- Ignatius Sancho, Ottobah Cugoano, and Olaudah Equiano -- and their work, which collectively represents the earliest emergence of black self-consciousness in England.

Spectacular Suffering

Spectacular Suffering PDF Author: Ramesh Mallipeddi
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 0813938430
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 343

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Book Description
Spectacular Suffering focuses on commodification and discipline, two key dimensions of Atlantic slavery through which black bodies were turned into things in the marketplace and persons into property on plantations. Mallipeddi approaches the problem of slavery as a problem of embodiment in this nuanced account of how melancholy sentiment mediated colonial relations between English citizens and Caribbean slaves. The book’s first chapters consider how slave distress emerged as a topic of emotional concern and political intervention in the writings of Aphra Behn, Richard Steele, and Laurence Sterne. As Mallipeddi shows, sentimentalism allowed metropolitan authors to fashion themselves as melancholy witnesses to racial slavery by counterposing the singular body to the abstract commodity and by taking affective property in slaves against the legal proprietorship of slaveholders. Spectacular Suffering then turns to the practices of the enslaved, tracing how they contended with the effects of chattel slavery. The author attends not only to the work of African British writers and archival textual materials but also to economic and social activities, including slaves’ petty production, recreational forms, and commemorative rituals. In examining the slaves’ embodied agency, the book moves away from spectacular images of suffering to concentrate on slow, incremental acts of regeneration by the enslaved. One of the foremost contributions of this study is its exploration of the ways in which the ostensible objects of sentimental compassion—African slaves—negotiated the forces of capitalist abstraction and produced a melancholic counterdiscourse on slavery. Throughout, Mallipeddi’s keen reading of primary texts alongside historical and critical work produce fresh and persuasive insights. Spectacular Suffering is an important book that will alter conceptions of slave agency and of sentimentalism across the long eighteenth century.

African-British Writings in the Eighteenth Century

African-British Writings in the Eighteenth Century PDF Author: Helena Woodard
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 0313388202
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 206

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Book Description
The eighteenth century was a time of great cultural change in Britain. It was a period marked by expeditions to the New World, Africa, and the Orient, and these voyages were reflected in the travel literature of the era. It was also a period in which seventeenth-century empiricism and the scientific method became dominant, and in which society became increasingly secular. Fundamental to the eighteenth-century worldview was the notion of the Great Chain of Being, in which all creatures and their Creator stood in a hierarchical relationship with one another. The years from 1660 to 1833 witnessed both Britain's participation in slavery and the appropriation of the Great Chain of Being by social anthropologists and political leaders. With the rise of the slave trade, blacks were brought to Britain against their will, where they were enslaved. At the same time, intellectuals of the period tried to place these slaves within the hierarchical frame provided by the Great Chain of Being. The presence of slavery in Britain aroused much debate among blacks and whites alike, and the literature of the eighteenth century reflects that debate. This book examines representations of blacks in eighteenth-century British literature to illuminate the discussions about race during that period. The volume begins with a discussion of Alexander Pope's popularization of the Great Chain of Being in his Essay on Man, which argued the universal ranking of humanity and which provided an intellectual foundation for slavery. It then examines the works of several white canonical writers, including Defoe, Addison and Steele, Swift, and Sterne, to see how blacks are portrayed in their works. The volume also examines works by African-British writers, such as James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw and Quobna Ottobah Cugoano, who expose exclusionary practices among some theologians; Ignatius Sancho, whose Letters show how slaves were taught to be grateful, and how those lacking gratitude were considered inhuman; and Olaudah Equiano, who shows how racial hierarchies function as a literary trope, particularly in travel literature. The final chapter, on The History of Mary Prince, examines the interaction of race and gender.

The Broadview Anthology of British Literature: Volume 3: The Restoration and the Eighteenth Century - Second Edition

The Broadview Anthology of British Literature: Volume 3: The Restoration and the Eighteenth Century - Second Edition PDF Author: Joseph Black
Publisher: Broadview Press
ISBN: 1460400267
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 1174

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Book Description
In all six of its volumes The Broadview Anthology of British Literature presents British literature in a truly distinctive light. Fully grounded in sound literary and historical scholarship, the anthology takes a fresh approach to many canonical authors, and includes a wide selection of work by lesser-known writers. The anthology also provides wide-ranging coverage of the worldwide connections of British literature, and it pays attention throughout to issues of race, gender, class, and sexual orientation. It includes comprehensive introductions to each period, providing in each case an overview of the historical and cultural as well as the literary background. It features accessible and engaging headnotes for all authors, extensive explanatory annotations, and an unparalleled number of illustrations and contextual materials. Innovative, authoritative and comprehensive, The Broadview Anthology of British Literature has established itself as a leader in the field. The full anthology comprises six bound volumes, together with an extensive website component; the latter has been edited, annotated, and designed according to the same high standards as the bound book component of the anthology, and is accessible by using the passcode obtained with the purchase of one or more of the bound volumes. For the second edition of this volume a considerable number of changes have been made. Henry Fielding’s Tragedy of Tragedies has been added, as has a new section of material from eighteenth-century periodicals. A new Contexts section entitled “Transatlantic Currents” includes writings by such figures as Paine, Franklin, and Price, as well as material on the slave trade. The Contexts sections on “Town and Country” and on “Mind and God, Faith and Science” have also been expanded; a variety of writings on the Royal Society and other scientific matters have been added to the latter. Additional chapters from Equiano’s Interesting Narrative have been added, and there are new selections by Samuel Johnson (including his “Letter to Lord Chesterfield” and facsimile pages from the Dictionary). Book 3 from Gulliver’s Travels has been added; that work now appears in its entirety. There are also additional selections by Pope, Pepys, and Astell. The Castle of Otranto and The Witlings have been moved from the bound book to the website component of the anthology. (Both are available as volumes in the Broadview Editions series, and may be added at a very modest additional cost in a shrink-wrapped combination package.)

Invoking Slavery in the Eighteenth-Century British Imagination

Invoking Slavery in the Eighteenth-Century British Imagination PDF Author: Srividhya Swaminathan
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317112997
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 228

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Book Description
In the eighteenth century, audiences in Great Britain understood the term ’slavery’ to refer to a range of physical and metaphysical conditions beyond the transatlantic slave trade. Literary representations of slavery encompassed tales of Barbary captivity, the ’exotic’ slaving practices of the Ottoman Empire, the political enslavement practiced by government or church, and even the harsh life of servants under a cruel master. Arguing that literary and cultural studies have focused too narrowly on slavery as a term that refers almost exclusively to the race-based chattel enslavement of sub-Saharan Africans transported to the New World, the contributors suggest that these analyses foreclose deeper discussion of other associations of the term. They suggest that the term slavery became a powerful rhetorical device for helping British audiences gain a new perspective on their own position with respect to their government and the global sphere. Far from eliding the real and important differences between slave systems operating in the Atlantic world, this collection is a starting point for understanding how slavery as a concept came to encompass many forms of unfree labor and metaphorical bondage precisely because of the power of association.

The African-British Long Eighteenth Century

The African-British Long Eighteenth Century PDF Author: Tcho Mbaimba Caulker
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 0739134876
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 217

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Book Description
Tracing the development of British colonial administration in West Africa over the course of the long eighteenth century, Caulker illuminates the solidification of the administration as it goes through a learning process of power. This book analyzes the documents and treaties that the indigenous peoples of eighteen-century Sierra Leone made with their future British colonizers, and compares them with the writings of Adam Smith to uncover a colonial philosophy linking European economic success with the process of civilizing Africa through moral education. A discussion of other archival materials demonstrates the ways that an emerging anthropological science and pseudo-scientific methodology contributed to colonial ventures and exploration. The book concludes with an analysis of the postcolonial novel The Last Harmattan of Alusine Dunbar, demonstrating that the study of this long eighteenth-century archive has as much to do with the present postcolonial era as it does with the period of African colonization.

The Black Aesthetic Unbound

The Black Aesthetic Unbound PDF Author: PH D April C E Langley
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780814256602
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 226

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Book Description
During the era of the slave trade, more than 12 million Africans were brought as slaves to the Americas. Their memories, ideas, beliefs, and practices would forever reshape its history and cultures. April C. E. Langley's The Black Aesthetic Unbound exposes the dilemma of the literal, metaphorical, and rhetorical question, "What is African in African American literature?" Confronting the undeniable imprints of West African culture and consciousness in early black writing such as Olaudah Equiano's The Interesting Narrative or Phillis Wheatley's poetry, the author conceives eighteenth-century Black Experience to be literally and figuratively encompassing and inextricably linked to Africa, Europe, and America. Consequently, this book has three aims: to locate the eighteenth century as the genesis of the cultural and historical movements which mark twentieth-century black aestheticism--known as the Black Aesthetic; to analyze problematic associations of African identity as manifested in an essentialized Afro-America; and to study the relationship between specific West African modes of thought and expression and the emergence of a black aesthetic in eighteenth-century North America. By exploring how Senegalese, Igbo, and other West African traditions provide striking new lenses for reading poetry and prose by six significant writers, Langley offers a fresh perspective on this important era in our literary history. Ultimately, the author confronts the difficult dilemma of how to use diasporic, syncretic, and vernacular theories of Black culture to think through the massive cultural transformations wrought by the Middle Passage.

An Illustrated History of Eighteenth-century Britain, 1688-1793

An Illustrated History of Eighteenth-century Britain, 1688-1793 PDF Author: Jeremy Black
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 266

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Book Description
Georgian Britain experienced a cultural renaissance in the form of the Enlightenment, the establishment of an empire & the beginning of the first industrial revolution.

The Diary of Antera Duke, an Eighteenth-Century African Slave Trader

The Diary of Antera Duke, an Eighteenth-Century African Slave Trader PDF Author: Stephen D. Behrendt
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0195376188
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 313

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Book Description
"One of the earliest documents written by an African residing in coastal West Africa predating the arrival of British missionaries and officials in the mid-19th century. Antera Duke was a leader and merchant in late eighteenth-century Old Calabar. His diary is a candid account of daily life in an African community during a period of great historical interest"--Provided by publisher.