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

This book explores transatlantic stories about women, servants, slaves and the poor as read and rewritten in eighteenth-century Britain and America.

Eve Tavor Bannet (Author)

9781107425439, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 10 July 2014

306 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.6 cm, 0.41 kg

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.

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.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: c 1800 to c 1900 [DSBF], Literary studies: c 1500 to c 1800 [DSBD], Literary studies: general [DSB], Literary theory [DSA]