In this path-breaking 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 them. 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 foreign, tyrannical 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, in figures such as Friday in Robinson Crusoe, and in gothic or 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, although their labour has provided the enabling conditions for Anglo-Atlantic liberty stories, African-Atlantic stories have been "framed" by 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.
Industry Reviews
"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
