Editor's Note

In 2007 Britain celebrated the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade 200 years earlier, and in 2008 Democratic Senator Barack Obama won election to the office of President of the United States. In light of these events, it seems appropriate that SECC 38 begins with a discussion, or a controversy, over the construction of a black man's identity, and that each subsequent essay continues to investigate the theme of how identity—of the self, the community, and the nation—is created, contested, and sustained. The energy generated by this theme is immediately apparent in Dennis Moore's "Colloquy with the Author": focusing on the often heated conversation sparked by the publication of Vincent Carretta's Equiano, the African, Moore's "living book review" presents us with a sample of the exchanges between Carretta and his readers on his biography of a remarkably intriguing man. What these exchanges reveal is how Carretta's stated purpose—"to give readers a sense of Equiano's life at the center of his time"—inevitably raises the issues of authenticity and intention, as participants in this roundtable (Ugo Nwokeji, Betsy Erkkila, and Marion Rust) note the discrepancies between the factual evidence Carretta's work presents and Olaudah Equiano's own identity-forming narrative of his experience. The complexities of (in Rust's words) the "late eighteenth-century black rhetorics of self-making" are important not only for what they reveal about the difficulty of Carretta's project, but also for what they suggest about Equiano's alliances with multiple, and occasionally antagonistic, communities—alliances that still trouble his readers today. Although presenting topics wholly different from the subject of this roundtable, all of the essays following it investigate the cultural practices and performances that create a sense of individual and collective identity, while examining the often unpredictable effects that this process generates.

The role of fiction in establishing identity on the national and domestic levels is the focus of the volume's first two essays. In "Behn's Monmouth: Sedition, Seduction, and Tory Ideology in the 1680s," Toni Bowers demonstrates how writers identified as Tories, particularly Aphra Behn, employed the narrative topoi of late seventeenth- and early-eighteenth-century seduction fiction in order to explain and rationalize the Duke of Monmouth's failed rebellion against his uncle, James II. As Bowers maintains, Behn's Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister—with its emphasis on a hero, who, like Monmouth, is both a victim of seduction and an agent in his own fall—serves as a paradigm of the "Tory self-refashioning" that appeared especially necessary after the Revolution Settlement: representing Monmouth in this manner enabled Tories to portray their resistance to authority and their collusion in transgression against James as compromising, yet still compatible with political virtue. For generations, as Bowers argues, the seduction tale remained the preserve of Tory writers, who found in its devices an interpretation of (and justification for) their partisan conduct. The narrative construction of a communal identity also forms the core of Tita Chico's "Details and Frankness: Affective Relations in Sir Charles Grandison." Chico maintains that in contrast to Richardson's previous novels, which portray individual characters in opposition to networks of kin and consanguinity, Sir Charles Grandison centers on affective communities, or extended family structures held together by mutual admiration, obligation, and the epistolary correspondence of women. These communities, according to Chico, are the products of (primarily female) narrative itself, as the combination of detailed observation and frankness in the characters' shared letters allows for the formation of affective bonds (such as the union of Sir Charles' and Harriet's families), while precluding more threatening kinds of relationships (such as extramarital intimacy). The conception of identity embedded within community thus challenges the emphasis literary history has placed on the novel as the expression of an individualist ideology.

Women's initiatives in producing and fostering forms of communal life are a distinctive feature of the next three essays in this volume. Rebecca M. Mills' "'To be both Patroness and Friend': Patronage, Friendship, and Protofeminism in the Life of Elizabeth Thomas (1675–1731)" examines how women writers like Thomas...