2. Slavery and the Romantic Imagination

Abstract

Selected by Choice magazine as an Outstanding Academic Title The Romantic movement had profound social implications for nineteenth-century British culture. Among most significant, Debbie Lee contends, was change it wrought to insular Britons' ability to distance themselves from brutalities of chattel slavery. In broadest sense, she asks what relationship is between artist and most hideous crimes of his or her era. In dealing with Romantic period, this question becomes more specific: what is relationship between nation's greatest writers and epic violence of slavery? In answer, Slavery and Romantic Imagination provides a fully historicized and theorized account of intimate relationship between slavery, African exploration, the Romantic imagination, and literary works produced by this conjunction. Though topics of race, slavery, exploration, and empire have come to shape literary criticism and cultural studies over past two decades, slavery has, surprisingly, not been widely examined in most iconic literary texts of nineteenth-century Britain, even though emancipation efforts coincide almost exactly with Romantic movement. This study opens up new perspectives on Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Shelley, Keats, and Mary Prince by setting their works in context of political writings, antislavery literature, medicinal tracts, travel writings, cartography, ethnographic treatises, parliamentary records, philosophical papers, and iconography.