Title Abolitionist geographies / Martha Schoolman

Published Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, 2014

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Description 1 online resource Contents Introduction: What Is Abolitionist Geography? -- Emerson's Hemisphere -- August First and the Practice of Disunion -- William Wells Brown's Critical Cosmopolitanism -- Uncle Tom's Cabin's Anti-Expansionism -- The Maroon's Moment, 1856/1861 Summary "Traditional narratives of the period leading up to the Civil War are invariably framed in geographical terms. The sectional descriptors of the North, South, and West, like the wartime categories of Union, Confederacy, and border states, mean little without reference to a map of the United States. In Abolitionist Geographies, Martha Schoolman contends that antislavery writers consistently refused those standard terms. Through the idiom Schoolman names 'abolitionist geography, ' these writers instead expressed their dissenting views about the westward extension of slavery, the intensification of the internal slave trade, and the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law by appealing to other anachronistic, partial, or entirely fictional north-south and east-west axes. Abolitionism's West, for instance, rarely reached beyond the Mississippi River, but its East looked to Britain for ideological inspiration, its North habitually traversed the Canadian border, and its South often spanned the geopolitical divide between the United States and the British Caribbean. Schoolman traces this geography of dissent through the work of Martin Delany, Ralph Waldo Emerson, William Wells Brown, and Harriet Beecher Stowe, among others. Her book explores new relationships between New England transcendentalism and the British West Indies; African-American cosmopolitanism, Britain, and Haiti; sentimental fiction, Ohio, and Liberia; John Brown's Appalachia and circum-Caribbean marronage. These connections allow us to see clearly for the first time abolitionist literature's explicit and intentional investment in geography as an idiom of political critique, by turns liberal and radical, practical and utopian"-- Provided by publisher Bibliography Includes bibliographical references and index Notes CIP data; item not viewed Subject Delany, Martin Robison, 1812-1885 -- Criticism and interpretation Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 1803-1882 -- Criticism and interpretation Brown, William Wells, 1814?-1884 -- Criticism and interpretation Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 1811-1896 -- Criticism and interpretation SUBJECT Brown, William Wells, 1814?-1884 fast Delany, Martin Robison, 1812-1885 fast Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 1803-1882 fast Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 1811-1896 fast Subject Antislavery movements -- United States -- History -- 19th century Abolitionists -- United States -- History -- 19th century Geography in literature. Antislavery movements in literature. African Americans in literature. American literature -- 19th century -- History and criticism SOCIAL SCIENCE -- Slavery. SOCIAL SCIENCE -- Human Geography. Abolitionists African Americans in literature American literature Antislavery movements Antislavery movements in literature Geography in literature United States Genre/Form Criticism, interpretation, etc. History Form Electronic book ISBN 9781452942131 1452942137 9781452942124 1452942129 0816680744 9780816680740 9780816680757 0816680752 9781452948744 1452948747

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