The fugitive slave known as “Three-Fingered Jack” terrorized colonial Jamaica from 1780 until vanquished by Maroons, self-emancipated Afro-Jamaicans bound by treaty to police the island for runaways and rebels. A thief and a killer, Jack was also a freedom fighter who sabotaged the colonial machine until his grisly death at its behest. Narratives about his exploits shed light on the problems of black rebellion and solutions administered by the colonial state, creating an occasion to consider counter-narratives about its methods of divide and conquer. For more than two centuries, writers, performers, and storytellers in England, Jamaica, and the United States have “thieved" Three Fingered Jack's riveting tale, defining black agency through and against representations of his resistance.
Frances R. Botkin offers a literary and cultural history that explores the persistence of stories about this black rebel, his contributions to constructions of black masculinity in the Atlantic world, and his legacies in Jamaican and United States popular culture.
In twentieth-century Britain the literary landscape underwent a fundamental change. Aspiring authors--traditionally drawn from privileged social backgrounds--now included factory workers writing amid chaotic home lives, and married women joining writers' clubs in search of creative outlets. In this brilliantly conceived book, Christopher Hilliard reveals the extraordinary history of "ordinary" voices.
Writing as an organized pursuit emerged in the 1920s, complete with clubs, magazines, guidebooks, and correspondence schools. The magazine The Writer helped coordinate a network of "writers' circles" throughout Britain that offered prospective authors--especially women--outside the educated London elite a forum in which to discuss writing. The legacy of Wordsworth and other English Romantics encouraged the belief that would-be authors should write about what they knew personally--that art flowed from genuine experience and technique was of secondary importance. The 1930s saw a boom in the publication of so-called proletarian writing, working-class men writing "in my own language about my own people," as Birmingham writer Leslie Halward put it. During World War II, soldiers turned to poetry to cope with the trauma of war, and the popular magazine Seven promoted the idea that anyone, regardless of social background, could be a creative writer. Self-expression became a democratic right.
In capturing the creative lives of ordinary people--would-be fiction-writers and poets who until now have left scarcely a mark on written history--Hilliard sensitively reconstructs the literary culture of a democratic age.
Many writers, from Aristophanes to Joseph Heller, have written about politics. But at certain periods in history, often at times of conflict and turmoil, writers have consciously used their literary talents to support or oppose a specific cause. The 1930s, a decade of widespread social and political breakdown, was such a period.
Today the Struggle examines the political involvement of those leading British writers who dedicated their talents to the defense of Nationalists or Loyalists during the Spanish Civil War and who saw that war as symbolic of their own Right-Left dialogue.
Conservatives like William Butler Yeats and T. S. Eliot and Roman Catholics like Evelyn Waugh were passionately anti-Communist. They viewed fascism as a bulwark against communism but were unwilling to support the Franco cause actively. Other pro-Nationalists were not so hesitant: Roy Campbell and Wyndham Lewis were ardent participants in the fight against the British left wing.
Pro-Loyalists, united only in their antifascism, ranged from conservative to anarchist in political commitment. Their literary contributions included fine poems by W. H. Auden and Stephen Spender, experimental drama by Auden and Christopher Isherwood, and impassioned prose by Rex Warner, George Orwell, and Aldous Huxley.
Katharine Hoskins’s principal interest in Today the Struggle is to discover how and why certain writers supported specific political actions, to ascertain the effectiveness of their efforts, and to evaluate the influence of these efforts on their work.
A noted scholar considers here a broad range of English autobiographical writing since 1800. Jerome Hamilton Buckley discusses not only autobiographies proper but also novels and poems animated by the subjective impulse. Drawing from time to time on American and Continental European writers, he focuses on British autobiographers, especially those, like Wordsworth, concerned with a larger psychological or spiritual dimension to their personal experience. With economy and grace, he examines the work of Darwin, Ruskin, Mill, Newman, C. S. Lewis, Bertrand Russell, and Edwin Muir. He discusses also the roleplaying and self-creation of Oscar Wilde, George Moore, Edmund Gosse, and Henry Adams. Variations in the autobiographical novel are described, with special attention to Dickens, George Eliot, Lawrence, and Joyce. Buckley concludes by exploring the differences between the principal Victorian poets and the confessional poets of today in their attitudes toward subjectivity.
Buckley reaffirms traditional notions—that the self exists and persists through its vicissitudes, that autobiography, for the most part, reflects or represents a pre-existing self rather than creating it, and that the self is rooted in history and in the objective social and physical world. No other book has attempted to place autobiography in a similar perspective, and none combines analysis of specific autobiographies with a regard for the function of subjectivity and a concern for its cultural consequences.
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