In this Book
- Slavery and Sentiment: The Politics of Feeling in Black Atlantic Antislavery Writing, 1770-1850
- Book
- 2009
- Published by: University of New Hampshire Press
- Series: Becoming Modern: New Nineteenth-Century Studies
summary
From the eighteenth century on, appeals to listeners' and readers' feelings about the sufferings of slaves were a predominant strategy of abolitionism. This book argues that expressions of feeling in those texts did not just appeal to individual readers' inclinations to sympathy but rather were inherently political. The authors of these texts made arguments from the social and political ideologies that grounded their moral and social lives.
Levecq examines liberalism and republicanism, the main Anglo-American political ideologies of the period, in the antislavery texts of a range of African-American and Afro-British authors. Disclosing the political content hitherto unexamined in this kind of writing, she shows that while the overall story is one of increased liberalization of ideology on both sides of the Atlantic, the republican ideal persisted, particularly among black authors with transatlantic connections.
Demonstrating that such writers as Phillis Wheatley, Ignatius Sancho, Olaudah Equiano, Frederick Douglass, and Mary Prince were men and women of their times, Levecq provides valuable new insight into the ideological world of black Atlantic writers and puts them, for the first time, on modernity's political map.
Levecq examines liberalism and republicanism, the main Anglo-American political ideologies of the period, in the antislavery texts of a range of African-American and Afro-British authors. Disclosing the political content hitherto unexamined in this kind of writing, she shows that while the overall story is one of increased liberalization of ideology on both sides of the Atlantic, the republican ideal persisted, particularly among black authors with transatlantic connections.
Demonstrating that such writers as Phillis Wheatley, Ignatius Sancho, Olaudah Equiano, Frederick Douglass, and Mary Prince were men and women of their times, Levecq provides valuable new insight into the ideological world of black Atlantic writers and puts them, for the first time, on modernity's political map.
Table of Contents
Download Full Book
- Title Page, Copyright Page
- pp. i-vi
- Acknowledgments
- pp. xi-xiv
- Introduction
- pp. 1-32
- 3 | Brotherhood, Radicalism, and Antislavery
- pp. 139-189
- 5 | The Case of Frederick Douglass
- pp. 226-240
- Epilogue: Transnationalism and Black Studies
- pp. 241-248
- Works Cited
- pp. 273-292
Additional Information
ISBN
9781584658139
Related ISBN(s)
9781584657347
MARC Record
OCLC
646807101
Pages
324
Launched on MUSE
2012-07-31
Language
English
Open Access
No