Familial Feeling

This open access book discusses British literature as part of a network of globalentangled modernities and shared aesthetic concerns, departing from theretrospective model of a postcolonial "writing back" to the centre. Accordingly,the narrative strategies in the texts of early Black Atlantic authors, like Equiano,Sancho, Wedderburn, and Seacole, and British canonical novelists, such as Defoe,Sterne, Austen, and Dickens, are framed as entangled tonalities. Via theirengagement with discourses on slavery, abolition, and imperialism, these textsshaped an understanding of national belonging as a form of familial feeling. Thisstudy thus complicates the "rise of the novel" framework and British middle-classidentity formation from a transnational perspective combining approachesin narrative studies with postcolonial and queer theory.