Romanticism and Slave Narratives

Helen Thomas’s study opens a new avenue for Romantic literary studies by exploring connections with literature produced by slaves, slave owners, abolitionists and radical dissenters between 1770 and 1830. In the first major attempt to relate canonical Romantic texts to the writings of the African diaspora, she investigates English literary Romanticism in the context of a transatlantic culture, and African culture in the context of eighteenth-century Britain. In so doing, the book reveals an intertextual dialogue between two diverse yet equally rich cultural spheres, and their corresponding systems of thought, epistemology and expression. Showing how marginalised slaves and alienated radical dissenters contributed to transatlantic debates over civil and religious liberties, Helen Thomas remaps Romantic literature on this broader canvas of cultural exchanges, geographical migrations and identity-transformation, in the years before and after the abolition of the slave trade.