| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 95.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 95.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Freedom's Empire: Race and the Rise of the Novel in Atlantic Modernity, 1640–1940. By Laura Doyle. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008. xii, 578 pp. Cloth, $99.95, ISBN 978-0-8223-4135-2. Paper, $27.95, ISBN 978-0-8223-4159-8.)

This book rearranges customary nationalist and temporal groupings of English-language novels to forge a transatlantic genealogy of texts that features the idea of liberty as a white birthright. Over time, the pairing of race and liberty provided a transatlantic principle of interiority and a quest plot for white characters. The strong first part of Freedom's Empire shows how an insurgent Saxonist discourse of freedom and race first appeared in anti-Stuart writings before the English Revolution and was later remixed in Whig historiography. Part 2 analyzes liberty's connection to ruin in rape, seduction, and middle passage plots. Parts 3 through 5 feature race and the permutations of the liberty plot in the narrative styles of gothic, epic, and modernist writing.

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