Blackness and Identity in Sarah Harriet Burney’s Geraldine Fauconberg (1808) and Traits of Nature (1812)
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.24197/ersjes.39.2018.97-115Keywords:
Nineteenth-century studies, gender studies, Sarah Harriet Burney, blackness, British literatureAbstract
One of the latest rediscoveries within the field of the Burney Studies is the oeuvre of Frances Burney’s half-sister, Sarah Harriet Burney, who also was a famous novelist during her lifetime. This paper focuses on two black characters in Geraldine Fauconberg (1808) and Traits of Nature (1812). By using a gender and postcolonial criticism, I analyze Sarah Harriet’s portrait of blackness and how this author approached the marginalization of the blacks in early nineteenth-century Britain, which is closely related to the oppression suffered by the heroines in her works.
Downloads
References
Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. Routledge, 1994.
Burney, Frances. Camilla. 1796. Edited by Edward A. Bloom and Lillian A. Bloom, Oxford UP, 1972.
Burney, Frances. The Wanderer. 1814. Edited by Margaret Anne Doody, Robert L. Mack and Peter Sabor, Oxford UP, 1991.
Burney, Frances. Traits of Nature. Henry Colburn, 1812. 5 vols.
Burney, Sarah Harriet. Geraldine Fauconberg. G. Wilkie and J. Robinson, 1808. 3 vols.
Burney, Sarah Harriet. “To Charles Frances Barret.” 1 Aug. 1811. Clark, The Letters of Sarah Harriet Burney, p. 133.
Burney, Sarah Harriet. “To Charlotte Frances Barret.” 4 Oct. 1811. Clark, The Letters of Sarah Harriet Burney, p. 140.
Burney, Sarah Harriet. “To Elizabeth Carrick.” 6 Dec. 1813. Clark, The Letters of Sarah Harriet Burney, p. 175.
Clark, Lorna J. “Sarah Harriet Burney: Traits of Nature and Families.” Lumen, vol. 19, 2000, pp. 121‒34.
Clark, Lorna J., editor. The Letters of Sarah Harriet Burney. U of Georgia P, 1997.
Czechowski, Tara Elizabeth. Conjurors, Wanderers, and Rebels: Women and Slave Resistance in Late Eighteenth-Century Writing. Diss. Fordham U, 2009.
Dabydeen, David. Hogarth’s Blacks: Images of Blacks in Eighteenth-Century English Art. Manchester UP, 1987.
Ferguson, Moira. Subject to Others: British Women Writers and Colonial Slavery 1670‒1834. Routledge, 1992.
Fernández Rodríguez, Carmen María. “The Quest for Acceptance in Sarah Harriet Burney’s Works.” Op. Cit.: A Journal of Anglo-American Studies, vol. 12, 2013, pp. 1‒15. docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&pid=sites&srcid= ZGVmYXVsdGRvbWFpbnxhcGVhYWRpcmVjYW98Z3g6Mzg4MjVlZDZlM2ZlM2Y1NQ/. Accessed 12 Nov. 2017.
Fernández Rodríguez, Carmen María. “To Be Chosen, Not Offered”: An Introduction to Sarah Harriet Burney’s Traits of Nature (1812).” ES: Revista de Filología Inglesa, vol. 36, 2015, pp. 129‒44.
Fernández Rodríguez, Carmen María. “Another Mistress of Deceit? Jane Austen’s Lady Susan and Sarah Harriet Burney’s Geraldine Fauconberg.” Persuasions On-line, vol. 36, no. 1, 2015. www.jasna.org/publications/ persuasions-online/vol36no1/fernandez/. Accessed 12 Nov. 2017.
Fernández Rodríguez, Carmen María. “Anne Elliot’s Afterlife in Sarah Harriet Burney’s Country Neighbours (1820).” Raudem, vol. 4, 2016, pp. 258‒73.
Gerzina, Gretchen Holbrook. Black London: Life Before Emancipation. Dartmouth College Library, 1995.
Hamilton, Count Anthony. Memoirs of Count Grammont by Count A. Hamilton: A New Translation, with Notes and Illustrations. S. and E. Harding, 1792.
Markley, Anthony. Conversion and Reform in the British Novel in the 1790s: An Evolution of Opinions. Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.
Midgley, Clare. Women Against Slavery: The British Campaigns, 1780‒1870. Routledge, 1992.
Nussbaum, Felicity. Torrid Zones: Maternity, Sexuality and Empire in Eighteenth-Century English Narratives. John Hopkins UP, 1995.
Nussbaum, Felicity. The Limits of the Human: Fictions of Anomaly, Race and Gender in the Long Eighteenth Century. Cambridge UP, 2003.
Nussbaum, Felicity. “The Theatre of Empire: Racial Counterfeit, Racial Realism.” The New Imperial History: Culture, Identity and Modernity in Britain and the Empire, 1660‒1840, edited by Kathleen Wilson, Cambridge UP, 2004, pp. 71‒90.
Salih, Sara. “‘Her Blacks, Her Whites and Her Double Face!’: Altering Alterity in The Wanderer.” Eighteenth-Century Fiction, vol. 11, no. 3, 1999, pp. 301–15.
Tobin, Beth Fowkes. “The English Garden Conversation Piece in India.” The Global Eighteenth Century, edited by Felicity A. Nussbaum, John Hopkins UP, 2003, pp. 165‒81.
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
Authors retain publishing rights and grant ES Review. Spanish Journal of English Studies right of first publication.
Simultaneously, all articles and reviews published in ES Review will be available under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0), by which others are allowed to share and use their work with an acknowledgement of the work’s authorship and initial publication in this journal.
In addition, ES Review allows authors to arrange additional contracts for the non-exclusive publication of the journal’s published version of the work (e.g., in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal. In such a case, authors are required to approach the editor(s)/publisher to request permission.
