Abstract
This paper provides a close reading on post-colonial engagements with American slavery in Belinda Starling’s neo-Victorian novel The Journal of Dora Damage (2007), particularly on the transoceanic links between Antebellum America and Victorian Britain. Firstly, this article engages with previous feminist criticism on the novel in order to analyse Starling’s stimulating revision of Victorian female abolitionism and interracial relations. Secondly, drawing on recent historical reconstructions on the presence of American slaves in Victorian England and seeking to open new avenues of research within this novel, this paper considers the transatlantic context inherent in Starling’s narration, particularly the interplay between nineteenth-century radical discourses and African-American discourses of liberation.
Highlights
On the 30th of March 1847 Frederick Douglass delivered his farewell speech to Victorian England
The purpose of my paper is analysing the presence of AfricanAmericans in nineteenth century England as well as deconstructing Victorian Britain’s role in the post-slavery period and the American Civil War as it is reflected in Belinda Starling’s The Journal of Dora Damage (2007)
Starling’s neo-Victorian narration deals with a bookbindress who, facing the prospect of taking care of her epileptic daughter and her dying husband in mid-Victorian London, gets entangled in the sordid trade of binding Victorian pornography and on the way starts an intimate affair with Din, a former American slave
Summary
On the 30th of March 1847 Frederick Douglass delivered his farewell speech to Victorian England. The purpose of my paper is analysing the presence of AfricanAmericans in nineteenth century England as well as deconstructing Victorian Britain’s role in the post-slavery period and the American Civil War as it is reflected in Belinda Starling’s The Journal of Dora Damage (2007).
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