The American slave narrative and the Victorian novel, 1833--1863

Description

While critics have begun to situate the works of William Blake, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Mary Shelley against the transatlantic anti-slave trade and abolition movements, their timeline of inquiry generally ends with the British Abolition Act of 1833, which roughly coincided with the waning years of British Romanticism. Postcolonial critics, meanwhile, have investigated the effects of West Indian slavery in the years following British emancipation, but their focus remains nationally circumscribed, overlooking the growing influence of American slavery in the literature of the Victorian period. This dissertation looks at how American slavery shaped the English Victorian novel. It examines, in particular, how Victorian novelists borrowed generic features of the American slave narrative to access its paradigm of suffering and resistance and to underscore slavery's global reach. The period between the British Abolition Act and the American Emancipation Proclamation (1863) marked the high point of transatlantic abolitionist activity, as England remade herself into the world's antislavery champion. In 1840, the first World Anti-Slavery Convention was held in London, an event at which British abolitionists dedicated themselves to the eradication of American slavery. In the following years, the British public was increasingly exposed to the plight of American slaves through the efforts of the British and Foreign Antislavery Society, the publication of antislavery literature, and the lecture tours of American fugitive slaves. This convergence of events would gradually but dramatically shift the focus away from the West Indies to America, so much so that by the 1850s, the antislavery struggle became synonymous with the internecine conflict in the United States. The American slave narrative was a critical vehicle in this transatlantic exchange, adhering to a simple but potent generic paradigm. Each recounted the runaway slave's passage from slavery to freedom, each emphasized the importance of literacy as a tool of liberation, and each made a passionate plea for abolition. This dissertation places the American slave narrative in global context and proposes transatlantic readings of four Victorian novels: Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre , W. M. Thackeray's Pendennis, Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South , and Charles Dickens's Great Expectations.

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