Slavery, Empathy, and Pornography [Hardcover]

This study considers the operations of slavery and of abolition propaganda on the thought and literature of England from the late-eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries. Incorporating materials ranging from canonical literatures to the lowest form of street publication, Marcus Wood writes from the conviction that slavery was, and still is, a dilemma for everyone in England, and seeks to explain why English society has constructed Atlantic slavery in the way it has.

List of plates
Introduction
1. Slavery, testimony, propaganda: John Newton, William Cowper, and compulsive confession
2. Slavery, empathy, and pornography in John Gabriel Stedman's Narrative of a Five Years Expedition Against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam
3. William Cobbett, John Thelwall radicalism, racism, and slavery
4. Slavery and Romantic poetry
5. 'Born to be a destroyer of slavery': Harriet Martineau fixing slavery and slavery as a fix
6. Canons to the right of them and canons to the left of them: Mansfield Park, Jane Eyre, and memorial subversions of slavery
7. The anatomy of bigotry: Carlyle, Ruskin slavery, and the new language of race
Conclusion
Bibliography