Familial Feeling Entangled Tonalities in Early Black Atlantic Writing and the Rise of the British Novel

• Main Author: Haschemi Yekani, Elahe (auth)
• Format: Electronic Book Chapter
• Language: English
• Published: Springer Nature 2021
• Subjects: Literary studies: c 1500 to c 1800; Literary studies: c 1800 to c 1900; Crime & criminology; Cultural studies; Eighteenth-Century Literature; Nineteenth-Century Literature; Ethnicity, Class, Gender and Crime; British Culture; Race and Ethnicity Studies; Literature and Cultural Studies; Postcolonial Literature; Black Atlantic Writing; The British Novel; Open Access; Literary studies: c 1600 to c 1800
• Online Access: OAPEN Library: download the publication; OAPEN Library: description of the publication

This open access book discusses British literature as part of a network of global entangled modernities and shared aesthetic concerns, departing from the retrospective model of a postcolonial "writing back" to the centre. Accordingly, the narrative strategies in the texts of early Black Atlantic authors, like Equiano, Sancho, Wedderburn, and Seacole, and British canonical novelists, such as Defoe, Sterne, Austen, and Dickens, are framed as entangled tonalities. Via their engagement with discourses on slavery, abolition, and imperialism, these texts shaped an understanding of national belonging as a form of familial feeling. This study thus complicates the "rise of the novel" framework and British middle-class identity formation from a transnational perspective combining approaches in narrative studies with postcolonial and queer theory.