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Helen Thomas. Romanticism and Slave Narratives: Transatlantic Testimonies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Pp. 332. $28.00.
Helen Thomas' sophisticated inquiry into slavery, identity, and language teaches readers about the Romantic period from a totally new perspective. She begins her book by establishing the context: the 1780s in England -was a time when public consciousness was taken by a number of issues relating to the African diaspora. Among these, she notes, were "debates concerning slavery, colonialist projects, land disputes and negotiations, repatriation schemes, enforced transportations (of blacks, whites, convicts and prostitutes) and programmes concerning racial eradication, emancipation and resettlement" (4). The late iyoos was also when radical dissenting Protestantism took its cue from moral philosophers like Beattie, Hutcheson, and Raynal and developed a new genre, the spiritual autobiography. Thomas defines spiritual autobiography as "a narrative of individual autonomy alongside declarations of the spiritual quality of masters and slaves" (29). The new genre grew into a discourse that Thomas convincingly argues was used by radicals and slaves, and in a less effective way, by Romantic poets too.
Thomas divides her book into two manageable sections. Part one concentrates on how the white western authors developed the genre of spiritual autobiography. She investigates the writings of dissenters Joanna Southcott, John Newton, William Cowper; of Romantic poets Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Blake; and of cross-cultural writers Thomas Jefferson and John Gabriel Stedman. Stedman's Narrative of a Five Years' Expedition Against the Revolted Slaves of Surinam is notable because in its relationship with radical dissenting discourse it can be read as a "narrative of deliverance, albeit an unorthodox one; for his text describes not a deliverance from sin into the grace of God, but a...