Description
Book SynopsisA sweeping argument that from the mid-seventeenth century until the mid-twentieth, the English-language novel encoded ideas equating race with liberty.
Trade Review“[I]nvigorate[s] the Atlantic as a category of literary and cultural study
in the West. In an effort to reconceptualize the abstract idea of freedom in the Atlantic world, Doyle demonstrates something fundamental to modern liberty—that at its foundation, it is a race myth. . . .
Freedom’s Empire generates crucial questions and insights that substantively complicate the intellectual invention of Atlantic modernity and its literary history.” - Christopher C. Freeburg,
American Literature“
Freedom's Empire is the most ambitious study of the novel and empire since Edward Said's
Culture and Imperialism. . . .
Freedom's Empire is a provocative history of the simultaneous articulation of race, freedom and empire in English-language literary and political practice.” - Corey Capers,
Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History“
Freedom’s Empire offers a unique perspective on Atlantic modernity. . . . Doyle shows that challenging the prevailing structures of literary criticism is imperative to a more nuanced understanding of what in an earlier collection Doyle termed ‘geomodernisms’. . . . Doyle’s study succeeds in its argument. . . . Impressively written and wide in scope,
Freedom’s Empire shows persuasively how ‘novels and histories became partners in the project of narrativizing racial liberty.’” - Marisa Huerta,
African American Review“Laura Doyle’s project in
Freedom’s Empire is nothing short of upending the ways in which we have grown accustomed to reading, writing, and talking about the development of the English-language novel. It is an ambitious project, to say the least, and yet one in which Doyle is entirely successful. This is one of the most exciting literary studies’ interventions I have encountered in a long time, and my guess is that it will further alter the way in which we think about the seemingly discrete categories of the British and American novel. . . . This is a remarkable book, one that I would encourage any scholar of the novel in English to make space for on his or her bookshelf.” - Sarah Gleeson-White,
Rocky Mountain Review“
Freedom’s Empire is a bold, exciting book. Laura Doyle shows how the call to move past the framing terms of nation and historical period will result in different readings not only of novels but also of the issues with which they engage. She demonstrates how challenging the structures of literary criticism can lead to a new transatlantic cultural history.”—
Priscilla Wald, author of
Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative“
Freedom’s Empire is a truly excellent work of scholarship, an important contribution to the study of the English-language novel, and a significant addition to the critical examination of the deep and varying entanglements of the discourses of race and modernity. It vitally enriches the growing field of Atlantic literary studies and will, I suspect, become one of the keystone texts of that field.”—
Ian Baucom, author of
Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History“Laura Doyle’s study provides a powerful and persuasive historical ‘Atlantic world’ recontextualization of the dialectical relation of African American and Anglo-American narrative traditions. This imaginative reframing complicates and deepens our understanding of the ‘Black Atlantic’ and energizes her readings of black authors, including Pauline Hopkins, Nella Larsen, and others.”—
Kevin K. Gaines, author of
American Africans in Ghana: Black Expatriates and the Civil Rights Era“
Freedom’s Empire offers a unique perspective on Atlantic modernity. . . . Doyle shows that challenging the prevailing structures of literary criticism is imperative to a more nuanced understanding of what in an earlier collection Doyle termed ‘geomodernisms’. . . . Doyle’s study succeeds in its argument. . . . Impressively written and wide in scope,
Freedom’s Empire shows persuasively how ‘novels and histories became partners in the project of narrativizing racial liberty.’” -- Marisa Huerta * African American Review *
“
Freedom's Empire is the most ambitious study of the novel and empire since Edward Said's
Culture and Imperialism. . . .
Freedom's Empire is a provocative history of the simultaneous articulation of race, freedom and empire in English-language literary and political practice.” -- Corey Capers * Journal of Colonialism & Colonial History *
“[I]nvigorate[s] the Atlantic as a category of literary and cultural study in the West. In an effort to reconceptualize the abstract idea of freedom in the Atlantic world, Doyle demonstrates something fundamental to modern liberty—that at its foundation, it is a race myth. . . .
Freedom’s Empire generates crucial questions and insights that substantively complicate the intellectual invention of Atlantic modernity and its literary history.” -- Christopher C. Freeburg * American Literature *
“Laura Doyle’s project in
Freedom’s Empire is nothing short of upending the ways in which we have grown accustomed to reading, writing, and talking about the development of the English-language novel. It is an ambitious project, to say the least, and yet one in which Doyle is entirely successful. This is one of the most exciting literary studies’ interventions I have encountered in a long time, and my guess is that it will further alter the way in which we think about the seemingly discrete categories of the British and American novel. . . . This is a remarkable book, one that I would encourage any scholar of the novel in English to make space for on his or her bookshelf.” -- Sarah Gleeson-White * Rocky Mountain Review *
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments xi
Introduction 1
I. Race and Liberty in the Atlantic Economy
1. Atlantic Horizon, Interior Turn: Seventeenth-Century Racial Revolution 27
2. Liberty’s Historiography: James Harrington to Mercy Otis Warrren 57
3. The Poetics of Liberty and the Racial Sublime 79
II. Founding Fictions of Liberty
4. Entering Atlantic History: Oroonoko, Imoinda, and Behn 97
5. Rape as Entry into Liberty: Haywood and Richardson 118
6. Transatlantic Seductions: Defoe, Rowson, Brown, and Wilson 145
7. Middle-Passage Plots: Defoe, Equiano, Melville 183
III. Atlantic Gothic
8. At Liberty’s Limits: Walpole and Lewis 215
9. Saxon Dissociation in Brockdon Brown 231
10. Dispossession in Jacobs and Hopkins 255
IV. Liberty as Race Epic
11. Freedom by Removal in Sedgwick 277
12. “A” for Atlantic in Hawthorne’s
The Scarlet Letter 301
13. Freedom’s Eastward Turn in Eliot’s
Daniel Deronda 311
14. Trickster Epic in Hopkin’s
Contending Forces 369
V. Liberty’s Ruin in Atlantic Modernism
15. Queering Freedom’s Theft in Nella Larsen 393
16. Woolf’s Queer Atlantic Oeuvre 413
Conclusion 445
Notes 455
Bibliography 507
Index 555
