Writings of the British Black Atlantic

Abstract

As Thomas Krise observes in Caribbeana, [c]hoosing texts for an anthology is always a contest between inclusivity and selectivity (11). Students of the long eighteenth century should welcome the victories the editors under review have achieved in their respective contests. Recent critical and theoretical developments in historicist literary criticism, feminist studies, and postcolonial approaches have made newly accessible a great range of texts that have long been out of print and largely ignored. Writers, subjects, and places during the period between the Restoration and the Victorian period that had at best been marginal concerns before the 1980s have become central in these singleand multi-volume, lightly annotated anthologies of transatlantic writings, all of which fruitfully ignore artificially constructed categories of competing national Anglophone literatures. Given that the three collections cover roughly the same period and frequently similar subject matter, there is remarkably little overlap in the texts included among them.