Overview

"In seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Britain, captivity emerged as a persistent metaphor as well as a material reality. The exercise of power on both an institutional and a personal level created conditions in which those least empowered, particularly women, perceived themselves to be captive subjects. This ""domestic captivity"" was inextricably connected to England’s systematic enslavement of kidnapped Africans and the wealth accumulation realized from those actions, even as early fictional narratives suppressed or ignored the experience of the enslaved. Domestic Captivity and the British Subject, 1660-1750 explores how captivity informed identity, actions, and human relationships for white British subjects as represented in fictional texts by British authors from the period.This work complicates interpretations of canonical authors such as Aphra Behn, Richard Steele, and Eliza Haywood and asserts the importance of authors such as Penelope Aubin and Edward Kimber. Drawing on the popular press, unpublished personal correspondence, and archival documents, Catherine Ingrassia provides a rich cultural description that situates literary texts from a range of genres within the material world of captivity. Ultimately, the book calls for a reevaluation of how literary texts that code a heretofore undiscussed connection to the slave trade or other types of captivity are understood."

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9780813948089

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Reviews

"Ingrassia's Domestic Captivity is a significant and unexpectedly enlightening book in all sorts of ways. . . Ingrassia brings before readers texts they may not have encountered before and provides a perspective that may enable us to read other 18th-century texts in innovative ways relevant to our society today. These texts also shed some uncomfortable light on and provide an unexpected heuristic context for understanding some of the anomalies of popular and respected 21st-century texts.-- ""The Eighteenth-Century Intelligencer"" An original and necessary contribution to the field of eighteenth-century transatlantic studies. Ingrassia's book works to illuminate how pervasive and how complex these domestic conceptions of captivity were. At the same time, she contextualizes her accounts with a constant awareness of the presence of Atlantic plantation slavery as a backdrop and a point of comparison. --George Boulukos, Southern Illinois University, author of The Grateful Slave: The Emergence of Race in Eighteenth-Century British and American Culture"

An original and necessary contribution to the field of eighteenth-century transatlantic studies. Ingrassia's book works to illuminate how pervasive and how complex these domestic conceptions of captivity were. At the same time, she contextualizes her accounts with a constant awareness of the presence of Atlantic plantation slavery as a backdrop and a point of comparison. --George Boulukos, Southern Illinois University, author of The Grateful Slave: The Emergence of Race in Eighteenth-Century British and American Culture

Author Information

Catherine Ingrassia is Professor of English at Virginia Commonwealth University and author of Authorship, Commerce, and Gender in Early Eighteenth-Century England: A Culture of Paper Credit.

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