Introduction: Provincialising the Rise of the British Novel in the Transatlantic Public Sphere

Abstract

In the introduction to Familial Feeling, Haschemi Yekani proposes a transatlantic reframing of Ian Watt’s famous work on the rise of the novel. Offering a critical overview of the intertwined histories of enslavement and modernity, this chapter proposes a focus on transatlantic entanglement already in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century to challenge the more prevalent retrospective paradigm of “writing back” in postcolonial studies. Introducing the concepts of familial feeling and entangled tonalities, Haschemi Yekani describes the affective dimension of literature that shapes notions of national belonging. This is then discussed in the book in relation to the four entangled aesthetic tonalities of familial feeling in early Black Atlantic writing and canonical British novels by Daniel Defoe, Olaudah Equiano, Ignatius Sancho, Laurence Sterne, Jane Austen, Robert Wedderburn, Charles Dickens, and Mary Seacole. To provide context for the following literary readings, scholarship on sentimentalism and the abolition of slavery is introduced and significantly extended, especially in relation to the shifts from moral sentiment and the abolition of the slave trade in the eighteenth century to social reform and the rise of the new imperialism and colonial expansion in the nineteenth century.