The American slave narrative and the Victorian novel, 1833--1863

While critics have begun to situate the works of William Blake, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Mary Shelley against the transatlantic anti-slave trade and abolition movements, their timeline of inquiry generally ends with the British Abolition Act of 1833, which roughly coincided with the waning years of British Romanticism. Postcolonial critics, meanwhile, have investigated the effects of West Indian slavery in the years following British emancipation, but their focus remains nationally circumscribed, overlooking the growing influence of American slavery in the literature of the Victorian period. This dissertation looks at how American slavery shaped the English Victorian novel. It examines, in particular, how Victorian novelists borrowed generic features of the American slave narrative to access its paradigm of suffering and resistance and to underscore slavery's global reach. The period between the British Abolition Act and the American Emancipation Proclamation (1863) marked the high point of transatlantic abolitionist activity, as England remade herself into the world's antislavery champion. In 1840, the first World Anti-Slavery Convention was held in London, an event at which B