In this Book
- Writing for Justice: Victor Séjour, the Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara, and the Age of Transatlantic Emancipations
- Book
- 2015
- Published by: Dartmouth College Press
- Series: Re-Mapping the Transnational: A Dartmouth Series in American Studies
summary
In Writing for Justice, Elèna Mortara presents a richly layered study of the cultural and intellectual atmosphere of mid-nineteenth-century Europe and the United States, through close readings of the life and work of Victor Séjour, an expat American Creole from New Orleans living in Paris. In addition to writing The Mulatto, an early story on slavery in Saint-Domingue, Séjour penned La Tireuse de cartes (The Fortune-Teller, 1859), a popular play based on the famed Mortara case. In this historical incident, Pope Pius IX kidnapped Edgardo Mortara, the child of a Jewish family living in the Papal States. The details of the play’s production—and its reception on both sides of the Atlantic—are intertwined with the events of the Italian Risorgimento and of pre–Civil War America. Writing for Justice is full of surprising encounters with French and American writers and historical figures, including Hugo, Hawthorne, Twain, Napoleon III, Garibaldi, and Lincoln. As Elèna Mortara passionately argues, the enormous amount of public attention received by the case reveals an era of underappreciated transatlantic intellectual exchange, in which an African American writer used notions of emancipation in religious as well as racial terms, linking the plight of blacks in America to that of Jews in Europe, and to the larger battles for freedom and nationhood advancing across the continent.
This book will appeal both to general readers and to scholars, including historians, literary critics, and specialists in African American studies, Jewish, Catholic, or religious studies, multilingual American literature, francophone literature, theatrical life, nineteenth-century European politics, and cross-cultural encounters.
This book will appeal both to general readers and to scholars, including historians, literary critics, and specialists in African American studies, Jewish, Catholic, or religious studies, multilingual American literature, francophone literature, theatrical life, nineteenth-century European politics, and cross-cultural encounters.
Table of Contents
Download Full Book
- Introduction
- pp. xiii-xxi
- Part I A Creole American Writer in Paris
- II In the Age of Emancipations: The Mortara Case and A Writer's Conscience
- 8 The Gender Issue in the Play
- pp. 55-57
- 9 Torn between Belongings
- pp. 58-64
- 13 An Age of Transatlantic Emancipations
- pp. 98-126
- 15 A Writer’s Indignant Conscience
- pp. 141-170
- III When It Snows History
- 16 Family Recollections: A Personal Note
- pp. 173-182
- Acknowledgments
- pp. 193-198
- Bibliography
- pp. 279-312
Additional Information
ISBN
9781611687910
Related ISBN(s)
9781611687897
MARC Record
OCLC
925585799
Pages
304
Launched on MUSE
2015-10-23
Language
English
Open Access
No