Tawil assesses Laura Doyle’s Freedom’s Empire: Race and the Rise
of the Novel in Atlantic Modernity, 1640–1940 as a rich, ambitious work
of scholarship working at the intersection of several paradigmatic shifts
in literary studies: the “transnational turn,” the adoption of the “Atlantic
world” paradigm for literary history, and a new genealogy of “modernity”
constituted by race. Doyle addresses these paradigms through the
lens of the “freedom plot” as it takes shape in, and shapes, the history of
the novel in English; she argues that this plot implies a racialized narrative,
and not only in the “African-Atlantic” tradition. Tawil finds that
Doyle’s focus on an “Anglo-Atlantic” literary history whose cultural
roots reach back to seventeenth-century political debates in which the
concept of freedom was no less charged, and no less racialized, effectively
designates the 1640s as the opening of her historical frame; this,
Tawil argues, makes the English revolutions of the seventeenth century,
rather than, say, the French or American revolutions of the eighteenth,
into the primal scene of modernity and English-language
narrative. The raced freedom plot, he finds, binds together the Atlantic
imaginary; a three-centuries-long modernity; the rise of the novel; and
the Idea of freedom. Tawil concludes that this long transatlantic perspective
retains its conceptual unity even as he also finds it useful to
put some critical pressure on the status, epistemological stability, and
historical continuity of race as an organizing principle.
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