Books at Duke University Press

Freedom's Empire: Race and the Rise of the Novel in Atlantic Modernity, 1640-1940
Laura Doyle

592 pages (January 2008)

Cloth - $99.95	0-8223-4135-2
[ISBN13 978-0-8223-4135-2]

Paperback - $27.95	0-8223-4159-X
[ISBN13 978-0-8223-4159-8]

In this pathbreaking work of scholarship, Laura Doyle reveals the central, formative role of race in the development of a transnational, English-language literature over three centuries. Identifying a recurring freedom plot organized around an Atlantic Ocean crossing, Doyle shows how this plot structures the texts of both African-Atlantic and Anglo-Atlantic writers and how it takes shape by way of submerged intertextual exchanges between the two traditions. For Anglo-Atlantic writers, Doyle locates the origins of this narrative in the seventeenth century. She argues that members of Parliament, religious refugees, and new Atlantic merchants together generated a racial rhetoric by which the English fashioned themselves as a “native,” “freedom-loving,” “Anglo-Saxon” people struggling against a tyrannical foreign king. Stories of a near ruinous yet triumphant Atlantic passage to freedom came to provide the narrative expression of this heroic Anglo-Saxon identity—in novels, memoirs, pamphlets, and national histories. At the same time, as Doyle traces through figures such as Friday in Robinson Crusoe, and through gothic and seduction narratives of ruin and captivity, these texts covertly register, distort, or appropriate the black Atlantic experience. African-Atlantic authors seize back the freedom plot, placing their agency at the origin of both their own and whites’ survival on the Atlantic. They also shrewdly expose the ways that their narratives have been “framed” by the Anglo-Atlantic tradition, even though their labor has provided the enabling condition for that tradition.

Doyle brings together authors often separated by nation, race, and period, including Aphra Behn, Eliza Haywood, Olaudah Equiano, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Harriet Wilson, Pauline Hopkins, George Eliot, and Nella Larsen. In so doing, she reassesses the strategies of early women novelists, reinterprets the significance of rape and incest in the novel, and measures the power of race in the modern English-language imagination.

“Laura Doyle’s study provides a powerful and persuasive historical ‘Atlantic world’ recontextualization of the dialectical relation of African American and Anglo-American narrative traditions. This imaginative reframing complicates and deepens our understanding of the ‘Black Atlantic’ and energizes her readings of black authors, including Pauline Hopkins, Nella Larsen, and others.”—Kevin K. Gaines, author of American Africans in Ghana: Black Expatriates and the Civil Rights Era

“Freedom’s Empire is a truly excellent work of scholarship, an important contribution to the study of the English-language novel, and a significant addition to the critical examination of the deep and varying entanglements of the discourses of race and modernity. It vitally enriches the growing field of Atlantic literary studies and will, I suspect, become one of the keystone texts of that field.”—Ian Baucom, author of Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History

“Freedom’s Empire is a bold, exciting book. Laura Doyle shows how the call to move past the framing terms of nation and historical period will result in different readings not only of novels but also of the issues with which they engage. She demonstrates how challenging the structures of literary criticism can lead to a new transatlantic cultural history.”—Priscilla Wald, author of Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative

Laura Doyle is Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She is the author of Bordering on the Body: The Racial Matrix of Modern Fiction and Culture; editor of Bodies of Resistance: New Phenomenologies of Politics, Agency, and Culture; and coeditor of Geomodernisms: Race, Modernism, Modernity.

See Reviews

Acknowledgments xi
Introduction 1
I. Race and Liberty in the Atlantic Economy
1. Atlantic Horizon, Interior Turn: Seventeenth-Century Racial Revolution 27
2. Liberty’s Historiography: James Harrington to Mercy Otis Warrren 57
3. The Poetics of Liberty and the Racial Sublime 79
II. Founding Fictions of Liberty
4. Entering Atlantic History: Oroonoko, Imoinda, and Behn 97
5. Rape as Entry into Liberty: Haywood and Richardson 118
6. Transatlantic Seductions: Defoe, Rowson, Brown, and Wilson 145
7. Middle-Passage Plots: Defoe, Equiano, Melville 183
III. Atlantic Gothic
8. At Liberty’s Limits: Walpole and Lewis 215
9. Saxon Dissociation in Brockdon Brown 231
10. Dispossession in Jacobs and Hopkins 255
IV. Liberty as Race Epic
11. Freedom by Removal in Sedgwick 277
12. “A” for Atlantic in Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter 301
13. Freedom’s Eastward Turn in Eliot’s Daniel Deronda 331
14. Trickster Epic in Hopkin’s Contending Forces 369
V. Liberty’s Ruin in Atlantic Modernism
15. Queering Freedom’s Theft in Nella Larsen 393
16. Woolf’s Queer Atlantic Oeuvre 413
Conclusion 445
Notes 455
Bibliography 507
Index 555