| Fictions of the Black Atlantic in American Foundational Literature Contributor(s): Mackenthun, Gesa (Author) |
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ISBN: 0415333024 ISBN-13: 9780415333023 Publisher: Routledge OUR PRICE: $171.00 Product Type: Hardcover - Other Formats Published: May 2004 Annotation: Inspired by recent postcolonial fictional reinventions of the history of the Black Atlantic, and employing the critical tools of colonial discourse analysis, this book examines a nineteenth century 'postcolonial' corpus - texts written between the emergence of the United States as a nation and the Civil War. The texts considered witness a growing unease about the issue of slavery and the slave trade that erupted in the Civil War in 1861. Many of the texts have the ocean as their setting and 'negotiate' the complex and ambivalent relationship of 'postcolonial' America to Atlantic commerce and the transatlantic slave trade. |
| Additional Information |
| BISAC Categories: - Literary Criticism | American - General |
| Dewey: 810.935 |
| LCCN: 2004040951 |
| Series: Routledge Transnational Perspectives on American Literature |
| Physical Information: 0.76" H x 6.28" W x 9.5" (1.08 lbs) 240 pages |
| Descriptions, Reviews, Etc. |
| Publisher Description: 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 imperial 'unconscious' in America's foundational writing. The book analyses the writings of canonized authors such as Charles Brockden Brown, James Fenimore Cooper, Edgar Allan Poe, and Herman Melville alongside those of lesser known writers like Olaudah Equiano, Royall Tyler, Frederick Douglass, Martin Delany, and Maxwell Philip, and situates them within the colonial, and 'postcolonial', context of the slave-based economic system of the Black Atlantic. While placing the transatlantic slave trade on the map of American Studies and viewing it in conjunction with American imperial ambitions in the Pacific, Fictions of the Black Atlantic in American Foundational Literature also adds a historical dimension to present discussions about the 'ambivalence' of postcoloniality. |