Displaced Britons: Africans and Creoles in the Work of British Author Maria Edgeworth (1768-1849)

FAIN: HB-251199-17

Robin Runia
Xavier University of Louisiana (New Orleans, LA 70125-1056)

Research and writing leading to publication of a book on the Anglo-Irish writer Maria Edgeworth (1768-1849) and her views of race and national identity.

With this reduction from my teaching load, I will complete research and write new material on Maria Edgeworth’s plays, Whim for Whim (1798) and The Two Guardians (1817). This work will comprise two chapters of the monograph, Displaced Britons. The completion of these chapters and the revision of the entire manuscript for publication submission contributes to current efforts to develop a more comprehensive and nuanced understanding of race in the Atlantic world. Specifically, this project offers close and historically contextualized readings of dramatic and fictional works by the late eighteenth- early nineteenth-century Anglo-Irish writer Maria Edgeworth. Its purpose is to introduce some of Edgeworth’s largely neglected works and to correct previous and partial interpretations of some of her more well-known writing. By focusing on works that depict the practice and consequences of the British slave trade in Jamaica, this book argues that Edgeworth offers a model of inclusive national identity regardless of race.

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