Familial Feeling

Beschreibung

'The key idea of this book is to reevaluate the rise of the British novel from Defoe to Dickens by reading it alongside early Black Atlantic writings from Equiano to Seacole. Elahe Haschemi Yekani profoundly argues that the rise of bourgeois regimes of affect – from 18th century sentimentalism all the way to the heteronormative model of the Victorian family which still haunts us today – was neither a national, nor a white project, but deeply invested and entangled in transatlantic slavery and its aftermath. Compellingly argued, and beautifully written.'

 - Lars Eckstein, Professor of Anglophone Literatures and Cultures, University of Potsdam, Germany.

'Familial Feeling provides a necessary corrective to the narrowly defined canon of great British Literature. Haschemi Yekani makes us rethink the structures that gird British literary epistemologies and opens our eyes to changes long past due. Familial Feeling is not only required reading for everyone who reads in the British literary tradition, it is also a compelling, nuanced inquiry into the construction of knowledge itself.'

- Michelle M. Wright, Longstreet Professor of English, Emory University, USA

This open access book discusses British literature as part of a network of global entangled modernities and shared aesthetic concerns, departing from the retrospective model of a postcolonial “writing back” to the centre. Accordingly, the narrative strategies in the texts of early Black Atlantic authors, like Equiano, Sancho, Wedderburn, and Seacole, and British canonical novelists, such as Defoe, Sterne, Austen, and Dickens, are framed as entangled tonalities. Via their engagement with discourses on slavery, abolition, and imperialism, these texts shaped an understanding of national belonging as a form of familial feeling. This study thus complicates the “rise of the novel” framework and British middle-class identity formation from a transnational perspective combining approaches in narrative studies with postcolonial and queer theory.

This open access book discusses British literature as part of a network of global entangled modernities and shared aesthetic concerns, departing from the retrospective model of a postcolonial “writing back” to the centre. Accordingly, the narrative strategies in the texts of early Black Atlantic authors, like Equiano, Sancho, Wedderburn, and Seacole, and British canonical novelists, such as Defoe, Sterne, Austen, and Dickens, are framed as entangled tonalities. Via their engagement with discourses on slavery, abolition, and imperialism, these texts shaped an understanding of national belonging as a form of familial feeling. This study thus complicates the “rise of the novel” framework and British middle-class identity formation from a transnational perspective combining approaches in narrative studies with postcolonial and queer theory.    

Autor*in

Elahe Haschemi Yekani

Themen in »Familial Feeling«

Postcolonial Literature Black Atlantic Writing Eighteenth-century Literature Nineteenth-century Literature The British Novel Open Access Literature and Cultural Studies

Stimmen zu »Familial Feeling«

“Familiar Feelings critically reconsiders a variety of well-trod conceptual grounds commonly found in the literary and cultural analyses of the long eighteenth century … . Yekani has produced a marvelous monograph that proves to be in equal measures insightfully, originally, indispensably, and (as befitting her object of inquiry) confoundingly entangled. … Familial Feelings …offer an exemplary illustration of the enormous complexity of such a task in the present.” (Alpen Razi, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, Vol. 35 (4), 2023)

“Haschemi Yekani’s ‘familial feeling,’ and thus exemplifies how these two monographs – indeed, all four discussed in this review – can profitably be read with and through one another. … Haschemi Yekani’s book is available online via SpringerLink as an ‘open access’ publication. … Much as one might be fond of hard-bound monographs … this mitigation of the economic and geographic barriers to Dickensian and other scholarship is clearly to be welcomed.” (Dominic Rainsford, Dickens Quarterly, Vol. 39 (3), September, 2022)

Details

Link teilen