After having discussed the tactics of epic writing in the 1790s and early 1800s, I return to 1789 in my sixth chapter in order to examine the subversive implications of Olaudah Equiano’s anticipation of the Romantic epic revival. Although his Interesting Narrative (1789) is not an epic, it borrows several aspects of the epic form in order to associate Equiano at once with both colonizers and the colonized. Mixing epic with autobiography, conversion narrative, and travel writing, the formal liminality of Equiano’s account amplifies his presentation of himself as a hybrid figure in terms of race and religion, allowing him to promote to his readers not merely Christianity, but a broader conception of identity that challenges the conceptual basis of slavery and imperialism. Drawing on the literary resources of his colonizers’ culture, Equiano ultimately uses his position as ‘other’ to promote in his Narrative a cosmopolitan Christian identity that transcends the categories of nation and race while revealing the flaws in the discourse of both evangelism and empire.

The emergence of classical economic liberalism was much more than just a European story. Economic liberal thought found supporters among thinkers from many other parts of the world in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, many of whom also adapted it in various ways in response to their local circumstances. This chapter highlights adaptations made by prominent thinkers from the Americas (Thomas Cooper, José da Silva Lisboa, Manuel Pardo y Lavalle, Carlos Calvo, Harold Innis), South Asia (Rammohun Roy, Dadabhai Naoroji), Africa and the Ottoman Empire (Olaudah Equiano, Alexander Crummell, Hassuna D’Ghies), as well as East Asia (Taguchi Ukichi, Yan Fu). The ideas of some of these figures also found an audience in Europe, revealing that liberal ideas flowed not just from Europe to the rest of the world but also in the other direction. Further, some economic liberals outside Europe questioned the European origins of this perspective by claiming its independent roots in their own region. In the Chinese case, the chapter also describes how a contemporary of Adam Smith’s, Chen Hongmou, developed ideas that bore some similarities to European economic liberalism without knowledge of the latter.

American Revolutionaries cast themselves as metaphorical orphans, voluntarily severing ties with an overbearing empire-parent. In rendering the trauma of orphanhood as a virtue, this particular metaphor required a harsh rite of passage for protagonists to move from minor status to self-sufficiency. Only by casting off natal relations and their burdensome histories could one move into freedom, as defined by an idealized white male citizen, unencumbered by the trappings of the past. The slave trade’s project of inflicting literal orphanhood on a massive scale sets off this early republican celebration of voluntary alienation in garish relief. The author explores how the tension surrounding orphanhood structured the American Colonization Society, one of the most widely supported and well-financed failures of the time. The ACS was nonetheless the collective author of the first narrative crafted to persuade African Americans of anything: here, to convince them that severing ties to the United States was the only path to true freedom. Attending to orphanhood as imagined in the writings of slavers, the enslaved, and early antislavery legislators, the author traces how theories of early republican childhood were shaped by a shadow narrative in which slavery’s history had to be severed from the nation’s progress.

This chapter argues that textual fluidity may be understood as a fundamental component of early Black Atlantic literature, texts orally related or written by individuals of African descent, predominately those first published before 1800. Early Black Atlantic orators and writers revised their texts for various purposes; nonauthorial subjects also regularly altered the literature for a variety of reasons. New – and needed – discoveries concerning the publishing and reception histories of early Black Atlantic literature emerge when unauthorized, posthumous, and abridged editions are studied with the same rigor as authorized editions. By employing this approach, Lamore offers fresh insights on the publishing histories of John Marrant’s, Olaudah Equiano’s, and Venture Smith’s autobiographical narratives.

This chapter argues that eighteenth-century African Atlantic authors perceived in the lives of Black people, distorted and destroyed by the slave system, a chaos that could be understood, protested, and then converted into a transition to a better Black world. The key to this understanding was Reformed Christian religion, and the guides to this transition were supposed to be religiously informed writers. Texts of early African Atlantic authors treat the changes they observed in the lives of Black people, for example, in the human body being reproduced in new sexual and labor regimes, in foods consumed in West Africa and the Americas, and in music as performed in old and new contexts. The telos of Black lives was a divinely inspired utopia, one millenarian version of which was Sierra Leone. Black authors responded to one another concerning their visions of holy goals for their people. The persistence of the slave system and new forms of racism crushed concrete efforts to create new Black societies in places like Sierra Leone. Yet textual interactions – these Black authors responding to one another – constituted the origins of the African American literary tradition. Black millenarian letters closed the eighteenth century; Black literature opened the nineteenth century.

This chapter examines the double vision of hope, sacred and profane, epitomized in English literature by the jointly authored poem, “On Hope,” in which Cowley’s satire on worldly wishes is interlaced with Richard Crashaw’s encomium on religious hope. Yet religious hope is de-centered in the Protestantism of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Milton, in Paradise Lost, shies away from hope as a theological virtue, seeing it tied to ambition and original sin. Hobbes, focused on things seen rather than unseen, treats worldly hope as a necessary part of human motivation and the reason, along with fear, for the strictures of civil authority. Hobbes’s naturalism tinges subsequent Christian writers, including Addison, Pope, and Johnson, who alternately satirize worldly hopes and treat them as inevitable and consolatory. In the French Revolutionary era there arises a new, properly political hope, aimed at alleviating or eliminating the structural conditions of poverty via democratic-representative activity. Hope as an anodyne for poverty, and for slavery, is questioned by laborer poets and the former slave and anti-slavery polemicist, Olaudah Equiano.

Antislavery agitation spread through reformers with American contacts, but Britain’s movement to abolish the slave trade became the largest social movement of the era. Publishing damning exposés of the traffic, lobbying Members of Parliament, and forming vibrant locals across the British isles, the movement sponsored massive petition-signings that (unlike preceding reform movements) mobilized across social class, while women were also mobilized for boycotting against slave-produced products. The movement only failed to produce immediate results due to a countermovement centered in the slave ports that raised counterpetitions and lobbied for British economic self-interest, particularly once war against Revolutionary France began in 1793.

May argues African American autobiography became integral to the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Atlantic cultural world with the publication of Briton Hammon’s 1760 account of his sea travels and captivity. With Hammon's text, the genre expanded to become a literary, political, and economic phenomenon by the time of the 1789 British publication of Olaudah Equiano’s more comprehensive and popular life story. In fact, 1760 is a year, May contends, that marks the beginning of known literature written and published by Black people living in England and British North America, a wide range of genres engaging life writing including slave narratives, captivity narratives, confessionals, pamphlets, poetry, sermons, and jeremiads. African American autobiography captivated the attention of a general readership until the end of the Civil War, a readership constituted mainly of a growing white middle class and elite reading audience.

Lamore examines revisions found in the full-length and abridged editions of Olaudah Equiano’s Interesting Narrative published in the United States, and contends that they serve as a type of textual signature; they record how the editor and/or book publisher revised the autobiography to appeal to different readers in the United States. The US publishing history of Equiano's Narrative demonstrates that whereas the publishing history of the authorized editions of the autobiography underscores Equiano’s successful attempts to control his life, text, and self, the publishing history of the US editions of the autobiography repeatedly reveals that his life, text, and self were edited by others. For Lamore, the editing of an autobiographical text by a non-authorial agent forms an essential part of its reception history and the history of the multiple actors present in published life narratives. The publishing history of A Narrative of the Lord’s Most Wonderful Dealings with John Marrant, a frequently read eighteenth-century autobiography related by a free person of African descent, provides another occasion to study unauthorized editions of transatlantic autobiography.

This chapter scrutinizes early frontispieces contained within books by Phillis Wheatley and Olaudah Equiano and then proceeds to examine the illustrated antislavery books of Moses Roper and Henry Bibb (both of which also contain frontispieces as well as other types of illustrations). Although Roper’s book was published in 1837 and Bibb’s in 1849, this chapter argues that both men (being born in 1815 and having participated in the antislavery movement) were responding to the abject treatment of the enslaved in earlier antislavery materials. The words of the text interact with its visual optic to interpellate the reader and envision a figurative mode of agency and self-possession for the enslaved body and the freed Black subject. The chapter concludes with a forward glance at artworks by Kara Walker and Glen Ligon that also attempt to excavate (although in a more abstract way) the trace of a resistant visual tradition within African American literature and US visual culture.

The dream as a rhetorical trope has a long history in African American literature and public discourse. Dreams and visions appear in a number of pre-1830 narratives and are characterized by the narrator’s interactions with the incredible, the divine, or the phantasmagorical. Because dreams are idiosyncratic and unreal, describing those dreams allows narrators to communicate important ideas or goals that might be heterodox or forbidden. Moreover, since it is both personal and imaginary, the dream is entirely unverifiable. This combination of imagination and narration is one reason early African American autobiographers made use of the dream vision as a rhetorical trope: the dream preserves a fictional space within a fact-based narrative. Within these fictional spaces, narrators could offer up visions of justice, morality, and faithfulness that deviated from white, European, and/or Christian norms. They could produce versions of self that were more capable, more powerful, or more insightful than the men who controlled the dominant institutions in the colonies and early United States. Ultimately, narrators could use dreams to make claims on their readers and – at the same time – to authorize their own actions in a world of prohibitions.

The eighteenth century saw a change in British readers’ sense of their place in the world. In the first half of the century, England – and later Britain – tended to imagine itself as the vulnerable but freedom-loving object of historical and contemporary global empires, engendering early Gothic images of tyrannical violence and ghostly resistance. However, the last decades of the century brought home news of war in America, the conquests of the East India Company and the vast horrors of the transatlantic slave trade. Britons were forced to begin to confront their own resemblance to the imperial tyrants against whom they had previously defined themselves. The Gothic became a means of articulating and managing the shock of this resemblance. In a wide range of genres, from stage pantomimes and Oriental novels to political speeches and abolitionist tracts, familiar discourses of Gothic oppression were combined with images and narratives of global cultural difference and colonial violence. Whether written overtly to promote or to oppose imperial expansion, these texts often diverted feelings of disquiet about the British empire onto its victims around the world.

This chapter considers the transatlantic influences that shaped Irish literary culture in the romantic period. In particular, it focuses on two understudied phenomena. First, the chapter provides an account of texts published in Ireland that concern African slavery and the transatlantic slave trade, written by pro-slavery sympathisers, white abolitionists, and writers of African descent like Ignatius Sancho and Olaudah Equiano. Second, it zeroes in on a forgotten Irish novel, Sarah Isdell’s The Vale of Louisiana, published in Dublin in 1805, which dramatises the transatlantic, trans-Caribbean travels of an English family, addresses slavery directly, and borrows heavily from a canonical early American novel, Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland (1798). The chapter concludes on the other side of the ‘steep Atlantic’, as Sydney Owenson called it, and briefly addresses the publication and reception of Irish writers in the early United States, especially Thomas Moore and Maria Edgeworth, where they found an unpredictable and productive future.