‘The extraordinary Negro’: Ignatius Sancho, Joseph Jekyll, and the Problem of Biography

Carey, Brycchan

doi:10.1111/j.1754-0208.2003.tb00257.x

Cited by 44 publications

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“…Brycchan Carey turns our attention to this problem of autobiography in relation to Sancho. There exists a short contemporary biography of Sancho ("The Life of Ignatius Sancho") by Joseph Jekyll accompanying the publication of the letters which, according to Carey (2003), has been reproduced uncritically as factual for too long. Nevertheless, for my enquiry it is not quite so relevant whether the life story of Sancho (and that of other authors of the Black Atlantic) is in fact true.…”

Section: Dashing Familiarity: Ignatius Sancho's Lettersmentioning

confidence: 99%

Digressions: Sancho and Sterne

Yekani

2020

Familial Feeling

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Artifice and authenticity are conflictingly related in the extroverted and stylised displays of feeling in the texts of Laurence Sterne and Ignatius Sancho. Whereas Sterne employs aesthetic playfulness to set himself apart from literary predecessors, Sancho uses it to claim a part in the culture of taste and sensibility. This chapter reads Sancho and Sterne’s literary adoption of a digressive tonality distinctly not as imitative but as entangled. The scenes dealing with slavery in Tristram Shandy and A Sentimental Journey are tied into more bawdy episodes. While not necessarily only sentimental, they still elude ideas of political solidarity. Sancho’s interjections of emotional concern in his published letters in turn not only highlight his capacity to feel (as well as his attachment to his family); in adopting the Sternian digressive dash, he does not adhere to the usual linear form of redemptive abolitionist writing and displays a uniquely Black aesthetic voice, albeit one that also reproduces deprecating sentimental tropes. This needs to be read as more than simply epigonic. Sancho’s digressive tone, it will be argued, intervenes more fundamentally into the sentimentalist romance with the cultured, feeling subject of modernity, while Sterne remains more elusive in his aestheticised divagations.

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Section: Dashing Familiarity: Ignatius Sancho's Lettersmentioning

confidence: 99%

Digressions: Sancho and Sterne

Yekani

2020

Familial Feeling

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“…5 However, as Brycchan Carey has pointed out, Jekyll's 'Life' must be approached with caution when looking for hard facts about Sancho's life: 'Jekyll's biography is unverifiable at best and in places directly contradicts Sancho's own selfrepresentation'. 6 Instead, it should be read 'in the context of eighteenthcentury literary conventions', for the genres and literary-textual allusions employed by Jekyll to render Sancho's life legible and exciting for his contemporary audiences. 7 In the biographical sketch that follows, I will therefore restrict myself to information about Sancho's life that can be documented from surviving eighteenth-century sources.…”

Section: Characterising Sanchomentioning

confidence: 99%