The speaking and the dead: antislavery poetry's fictions of the person

Many late-eighteenth-century antislavery poems represent enslaved persons as poetic speakers; a subset depict speakers who are dying or dead. These poems associate speech with death, using prosopopoeia to give voice to the dying and the dead. They separate rhetorical existence from biological life, calling attention to figure’s role in making these speakers speak. The antislavery poetry under discussion here—The Dying Negro as well as “The Dying African,” “The Desponding Negro,” and two anonymous poems that appeared in The Gentleman’s Magazine—highlights figure’s status as a fiction. Unlike sentimental antislavery verse, which has typically been understood to use figure in an attempt to confer humanity, and which therefore has been seen to associate figure with life-giving and humanizing powers, these works sidestep such circuits of humanity and inhumanity. They not only cast light on the centrality of death to antislavery poetry, but also invite reflection on what follows from the division between living and speaking. The speaking dead are rhetorical persons but not politico-legal persons: they interrupt the slippage between these two categories of the person, clearly demonstrating the inability of figure to confer rights while still using it to call for radical change

From man-machine to woman-machine: automata, fiction, and femininity in Dibdin's Hannah Hewit and Burney's Camilla.

No description supplie

The last animal: cosmopolitanism in The Last Man

No description supplie

What happens when pornography ends in marriage: the uniformity of pleasure in Fanny Hill

This essay argues that John Cleland's pornographic novel, Fanny Hill, conceals coercion by employing the language of materialism to suggest that all sex, commercial or not, produces pleasure. While the ostensible benevolence of human instinct allows the novel to sidestep questions of injury and rape, they persist until Fanny's marriage, which delivers her to conjugal felicity. Fanny Hill presents an extreme version of the marriage plot, showing that marriage's claim to retroactively pardon harm allows it to sanction violent means. Cleland's novel implicates Pamela by demonstrating that they share a basic structure: materialist pornography, like the marriage plot, transforms injury into the impossibility thereof, forcefully restricting first-person narrative in the process

The cynic as cosmopolitan animal

No description supplie

First Words, Last Words

Abstract This short piece reads two of Phillis Wheatley’s elegies to children to reflect on how they represent the dead as speaking rather than silent. It considers how the deceased’s speech invokes different categories of the child, overlaying political and theological ideas about children’s vulnerability and potential power.</jats:p