The popularization of the digital humanities and the return to formalism are overdetermined by the perceived crises in the humanities. On the one hand, the new formalism harks back to a professionalizing strategy begun by the New Critics with John Crowe Ransom's “Criticism, Inc.,” drawing strength from close reading's original polemic against industrialism. On the other hand, the digital humanities reimagine professional labor in ways that seemingly approximate postindustrial norms. These contradictory but inextricably related visions of professional futures restage a conflict between literature and data, reading and making, that has been misrecognized as a conflict between literature and history. Approaching these tensions by way of historicist critique can illuminate the extent to which the debate between literature and data will define critical practice in the twenty-first century.

This essay examines Olaudah Equiano’s use of novelistic types in light of his vision for collective commerce between Britain and Africa. Both in Equiano’s own day and in our own, criticism of his Narrative (1789) has emphasized his transition from the general to the particular, from the slave to the subject. Engaging the longstanding autobiographical reading, this essay identifies instead Equiano’s interests in types of and groups of people. In doing so, it finds the transformation from a pre-commercial type of African to a commercial one that occurs in the text to reflect Equiano’s economic worldview. As it draws on what one scholar terms the “speculative discourse” of eighteenth-century finance, a discourse that was linked with the early realist novel, the Narrative helps us to apprehend how Equiano hoped to change the terms of global commerce.

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