Transatlantic Stories and the History of Reading, 1720-1810: Migrant Fictions

by Eve Tavor Bannet

Overview

Eve Tavor Bannet explores some of the remarkable stories about the Atlantic world that shaped Britons' and Americans' perceptions of that world. These stories about women, servants, the poor and the dispossessed were frequently rewritten or reframed by editors and printers in America and Britain for changing audiences, times and circumstances. Bannet shows how they were read by examining what contemporaries said about them and did with them; in doing so, she reveals the creatively dynamic and unstable character of transatlantic print culture. Stories include the 'other' Robinson Crusoe and works by Penelope Aubin, Rowlandson, Chetwood, Tyler, Kimber, Richardson, Gronniosaw, Equiano, Cugoano Marrant, Samson Occom, Mackenzie and Pratt.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781139064040
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	07/07/2011
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	722 KB

About the Author

Eve Tavor Bannet is George Lynn Cross Professor of English at the University of Oklahoma. Her books include Empire of Letters: Letter Manuals and Transatlantic Correspondence, 1680–1820 (Cambridge University Press, 2005); The Domestic Revolution: Enlightenment Feminisms and the Novel (2000); a four-volume edition of British and American Letter Manuals, 1680–1810 (2008) and Transatlantic Literary Studies, a collection of essays by British, American and Canadian scholars (co-edited with Susan Manning, Cambridge University Press, 2011).

Table of Contents

Introduction: transatlantic stories and transatlantic readers; Part I. 'Poor Man's Country': 1. Strange adventures; 2. Captivity and antislavery; 3. The parallel Atlantic economy; 4. Fortune's footballs; Part II. The Servant's Tale: 5. The bonds of servitude; 6. Bond and free: contemporary readings of Gronniosaw's Life; 7. Samson Occom's itinerancies; Part III. Printscapes: 8. Robert Bell's theaters of war: the war on politeness; 9. Robert Bell's theaters of war: the war upon war; Afterword.