Troping West Indian Slavery, or, Literary Studies and the Politics of Eighteenth-Century Sentimental Fiction

In this paper I will begin with a brief survey of literary criticism on representations of West Indian slavery from Wylie Sypher’s Guinea’s Captive Kings (1942) to the present. The earliest criticism on the topic influentially associated sentimentality with abolitionism, understanding both phenomena as aspects of a larger humanitarian movement in the eighteenth century, while ignoring the concrete historical situation in which works such as Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko (1688) were written. Recent literary critics, however, have attempted to situate sentimentality more specifically, and have therefore seen it as being used to defend slavery and even as producing and disseminating influential new conceptions of racial difference. I will conclude by offering an example—via the figure of the grateful slave—of how literary scholars use literary tools to engage with recent historical work on eighteenth-century debates about West Indian slavery.