Freedom's Empire

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.

• Acknowledgments xiIntroduction 1I. Race and Liberty in the Atlantic Economy 1. Atlantic Horizon, Interior Turn: Seventeenth-Century Racial Revolution 272. Liberty’s Historiography: James Harrington to Mercy Otis Warrren 573. The Poetics of Liberty and the Racial Sublime 79II. Founding Fictions of Liberty 4. Entering Atlantic History: Oroonoko, Imoinda, and Behn 975. Rape as Entry into Liberty: Haywood and Richardson 1186. Transatlantic Seductions: Defoe, Rowson, Brown, and Wilson 1457. Middle-Passage Plots: Defoe, Equiano, Melville 183III. Atlantic Gothic 8. At Liberty’s Limits: Walpole and Lewis 2159. Saxon Dissociation in Brockdon Brown 23110. Dispossession in Jacobs and Hopkins 255IV. Liberty as Race Epic 11. Freedom by Removal in Sedgwick 27712. “A” for Atlantic in Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter 30113. Freedom’s Eastward Turn in Eliot’s Daniel Deronda 31114. Trickster Epic in Hopkin’s Contending Forces 369V. Liberty’s Ruin in Atlantic Modernism 15. Queering Freedom’s Theft in Nella Larsen 39316. Woolf’s Queer Atlantic Oeuvre 413Conclusion 445Notes 455Bibliography 507Index 555

“[I]nvigorate[s] the Atlantic as a category of literary and cultural studyin the West. In an effort to reconceptualize the abstract idea of freedom in the Atlantic world, Doyle demonstrates something fundamental to modern liberty-that at its foundation, it is a race myth. . . . Freedom’s Empire generates crucial questions and insights that substantively complicate the intellectual invention of Atlantic modernity and its literary history.” - Christopher C. Freeburg, American Literature “Freedom's Empire is the most ambitious study of the novel and empire since Edward Said's Culture and Imperialism. . . . Freedom's Empire is a provocative history of the simultaneous articulation of race, freedom and empire in English-language literary and political practice.” - Corey Capers, Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History “Freedom’s Empire offers a unique perspective on Atlantic modernity. . . . Doyle shows that challenging the prevailing structures of literary criticism is imperative to a more nuanced understanding of what in an earlier collection Doyle termed ‘geomodernisms’. . . . Doyle’s study succeeds in its argument. . . . Impressively written and wide in scope, Freedom’s Empire shows persuasively how ‘novels and histories became partners in the project of narrativizing racial liberty.’” - Marisa Huerta, African American Review “Laura Doyle’s project in Freedom’s Empire is nothing short of upending the ways in which we have grown accustomed to reading, writing, and talking about the development of the English-language novel. It is an ambitious project, to say the least, and yet one in which Doyle is entirely successful. This is one of the most exciting literary studies’ interventions I have encountered in a long time, and my guess is that it will further alter the way in which we think about the seemingly discrete categories of the British and American novel. . . . This is a remarkable book, one that I would encourage any scholar of the novel in English to make space for on his or her bookshelf.” - Sarah Gleeson-White, Rocky Mountain Review “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 “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 “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 offers a unique perspective on Atlantic modernity. . . . Doyle shows that challenging the prevailing structures of literary criticism is imperative to a more nuanced understanding of what in an earlier collection Doyle termed ‘geomodernisms’. . . . Doyle’s study succeeds in its argument. . . . Impressively written and wide in scope, Freedom’s Empire shows persuasively how ‘novels and histories became partners in the project of narrativizing racial liberty.’” - Marisa Huerta (African American Review) “Freedom's Empire is the most ambitious study of the novel and empire since Edward Said's Culture and Imperialism. . . . Freedom's Empire is a provocative history of the simultaneous articulation of race, freedom and empire in English-language literary and political practice.” - Corey Capers (Journal of Colonialism & Colonial History) “[I]nvigorate[s] the Atlantic as a category of literary and cultural study in the West. In an effort to reconceptualize the abstract idea of freedom in the Atlantic world, Doyle demonstrates something fundamental to modern liberty-that at its foundation, it is a race myth. . . . Freedom’s Empire generates crucial questions and insights that substantively complicate the intellectual invention of Atlantic modernity and its literary history.” - Christopher C. Freeburg (American Literature) “Laura Doyle’s project in Freedom’s Empire is nothing short of upending the ways in which we have grown accustomed to reading, writing, and talking about the development of the English-language novel. It is an ambitious project, to say the least, and yet one in which Doyle is entirely successful. This is one of the most exciting literary studies’ interventions I have encountered in a long time, and my guess is that it will further alter the way in which we think about the seemingly discrete categories of the British and American novel. . . . This is a remarkable book, one that I would encourage any scholar of the novel in English to make space for on his or her bookshelf.” - Sarah Gleeson-White (Rocky Mountain Review)