A Poetics of Relation

Censorship and Interpretation The Conditions of Writing and Reading in Early Modern England.

https://muse.jhu.edu/journals/civil_war_history/v018/18.1.loveland.pdf

The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, 1817-1914 (review)

The Leopard's Spots: Scientific Attitudes Toward Race in America, 1815–59 by William Stanton

Unfinished Revolution: Haiti, Black Sovereignty and Power in the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World

Leonora Sansay's Secret History; or the Horrors of St. Domingo (1808) is pref- aced by a timid confession. She writes: "I am fearful of having been led into an error by my friends, when taught by them to believe that I could write something which would interest and please; and it was chiefly with a view to ascertain what confidence I might place in their kind assurances on the subject, that I collected and consented, though reluctantly, to the publication of these letters. Should a less partial public give them a favourable reception, and allow them to possess some merit, it would encour- age me to endeavour to obtain their further approbation by a little work already planned and in some forwardness" (60). Sansay immediately discloses a productive tension at the core of her text's narrative structure. A private tale written by a Philadel- phia-born woman and presented as "A Series of Letters" based on those she wrote to the "Late Vice-President, Colonel Burr," Leonora Sansay's Secret History announces its aim to provide intimate secrets for the benefit of public history. This conceit, among others, locates the text within the British literary genealogy of the secret history, a genre primarily encountered in England during the long eighteenth-century; early practitioners included Daniel Defoe, John Oldmixon, Henry Brooks, Aphra Behn, De- lariviere Manley and Eliza Haywood. 1 Sansay's Secret History is generically jarring in part because of these similarities to such literary predecessors, but also because of its physical distance from a metropolitan center, and its temporal distance from the genre's nearly comprehensive decline over half a century earlier. One cannot help but be struck by how far out—and away—the secret history has traveled. 2

Romance to Novel: A Secret History

John Howison's New Gothic Nationalism and Transatlantic Exchange

Hemispheric Regionalism: Romance and the Geography of Genre

This essay introduces the concept of hemispheric regionalism as a way of understanding the expansive scales of oceanic and hemispheric perspectives. Drawing on Bruno Latour's actor-network theory, hemispheric regionalism flattens the map, and makes visible three things: (1) the different coordinates in play; (2) the importance of the sea in these relations; and (3) the vehicles that travel between different geographic regions. Genre is that vehicle; popular romance mediates the distance and differences across the sea between the US and Cuba in the long nineteenth century. In its ability to retain multiple histories on its surface, the popular romances circulating prior to the Civil War, and long before dime novels, worked to entertain and make sense of the future of US–Cuban relations. The 90-mile waterway between the coasts became the most popular site of literary experimentation in news, notices, and periodicals awash with fascination and anxiety about Cuba. Editor, publisher, and writer Maturi...

Gretchen J. Woertendyke

Papers

Romance to Novel: A Secret History

John Howison's New Gothic Nationalism and Transatlantic Exchange

Hemispheric Regionalism: Romance and the Geography of Genre

Geography, genre, and hemispheric regionalism

The Sea Is History