"The Horrors of Slavery and other writings" 

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He synthesised Afro-Jamaican and British evangelical religion, British radical republicanism and agrarian utopianism, and traditions of slave resistance and rebellion into an aggressive revolutionary theory and practice.

At a time when the British state was vigorously hunting radicals and the movement to abolish slavery was very active - and even in the face of a visit in prison from the mythical saviour of slaves, William Wilberforce - Wedderburn refused to reduce his political activism to the single issue of abolition.

Markus WIENER PUBLISHERS, New York

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Radical Underworld

Prophets, Revolutionaries, and Pornographers in London, 1795-1840

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• `[A] brilliant success' London Review of Books
• `It is impossible to conceive of any scholar doing a more thorough job than McCalman has in uncovering the non-traditional by-ways of London radicalism ... Every aspect of popular culture becomes a potential source of enlightenment for McCalman as he leads the reader on an unpredictable, sometimes harrowing , journey through the radical underworld.' Joel H. Wiener, Journal of Modern History
• `Beautifully researched and crafted book ... It is a model for the cultural history of politics and popular movements.' American Historical Review
• `McCalman vividly evokes the milieu and culture which revolutionary artisans shared with the celebrated engraver-poet William Blake ... the radical mouthpieces of a rich, fascinating, and too little known underground radical culture of the world we have lost. Roy Porter, Journal of the History of the Behavioural Sciences

This is a paperback edition of a highly acclaimed study of English popular radicalism during the period between the anti-Jacobin government `Terror' of the 1790s and the beginnings of Chartism. Challenging conventional distinctions between `high' and `low' culture, Iain McCalman brilliantly reveals the links between the political underworld and literary culture, poverty, crime, and prophetic religion.

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Edited by Iain McCalman, Director, Humanities Research Centre, Australian National University, Canberra

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Click on the Cambridge University Press logo to go straight to the page to order "Romanticism and Slave Narratives" (UK orders)

Title Details
ISBN: 0521662346
Binding: Hardback
Published: 27 April 2000

Price: GBP 37.50

http://uk.cambridge.org/

Romanticism and Slave Narratives

Helen Thomas
Queen Mary and Westfield College, University of London

Description
Helen Thomas’s study opens a new avenue for Romantic literary studies by exploring connections with literature produced by slaves, slave owners, abolitionists and radical dissenters between 1770 and 1830. In the first major attempt to relate canonical Romantic texts to the writings of the African diaspora, she investigates English literary Romanticism in the context of a transatlantic culture, and African culture in the context of eighteenth-century Britain. In so doing, the book reveals an intertextual dialogue between two diverse yet equally rich cultural spheres, and their corresponding systems of thought, epistemology and expression. Showing how marginalised slaves and alienated radical dissenters contributed to transatlantic debates over civil and religious liberties, Helen Thomas remaps Romantic literature on this broader canvas of cultural exchanges, geographical migrations and identity-transformation, in the years before and after the abolition of the slave trade.

Chapter Contents
Introduction; 1. The English slave trade and abolitionism; 2. Radical dissent and spiritual autobiography: Joanna Southcott, John Newton and William Cowper; 3. Romanticism and abolitionism: Mary Wollstonecraft, William Blake, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth; 4. Cross-cultural contact: John Stedman, Thomas Jefferson and the slaves; 5. The diasporic identity: language and the paradigms of liberation; 6. The early slave narratives: Jupiter Hammon, John Marrant and Ottobah Gronniosaw; 7. Phyllis Wheatley: poems and letters; 8. Olaudah Equiano’s Interesting Narrative; 9. Robert Wedderburn and mulatto discourse.

Email: hansib@resolutions.netkonect.co.uk

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South Africa Email: gondwana@hixnet.co.za

REMEMBER ME

by Asher & Martin Hoyles           ISBN 1 870518 62 4

30 biographies of mixed-race figures from past and present, including a piece on Robert Wedderburn. A book that "attempts to help the learning process. It challenges the view that being of mixed-race is simply a problem, it shows how belonging to more than one culture and tradition can be an advantage...." 

Martin Hoyles is a senior lecturer in Communication Studies and the University of East London. Published works include "The Politics of Childhood" (1989), "The Politics of Literacy" (1977), "Changing Childhood" (1979), "More Valuable than Gold" (1985).

Asher Hoyles is a performance poet. She writes poetry in a variety of styles based on her experience as an Caribbean African who has grown up in the UK. 

by

David Worrall

Wayne State University Press

ISBN 0-8143-2452-5

This fascinating treatise of the spy culture in England between 1790 and 1820 dedicates a chapter to Robert Wedderburn, and reveals that he and his fellow radicals were under almost constant surveillance. Extracts from the reports of spies, informers and moles abound, a fascinating and unique insight into the revolutionary ideologies of those involved, their courage, their determination to speak out despite being constantly hounded by the government of the day, the ever-present threat of arrest and possible execution. In the following example Robert Wedderburn exhorts his audience to action, November 1819 ...............

"Ministers have sacrificed the Welfare of the country to enrich themselves and it is now high time we look'd after them - but the Bloody Revolution is near at hand; yes the Bloody Revolution I say, because some of these Bloody Murdering thieves who would rob us of the Shirt from of our Backs will either be shot or lose their Heads; and to stimulate my sons I take care to show them their degraded situation and call them Cowards !!!"

Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker          BEACON PRESS

THE MANY-HEADED HYDRA

SAILORS, SLAVES, COMMONERS, AND THE HIDDEN HISTORY OF THE REVOLUTIONARY ATLANTIC

"For most readers the tale told here will be completely new. For those already well acquainted with the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the image of that age which they have been so carefully taught and cultivated will be profoundly challenged."—David Montgomery, author of Citizen Worker

Read an excerpt from the chapter on Robert Wedderburn

"More than just a vivid illustration of the gains involved in thinking beyond the boundaries between nation-states. Here, in incendiary form, are essential elements for a people's history of our dynamic, transcultural present."—Paul Gilroy, author of The Black Atlantic

"This is a marvelous book. Linebaugh and Rediker have done an extraordinary job of research into buried episodes and forgotten writings to recapture, with eloquence and literary flair, the lost history of resistance to capitalist conquest on both sides of the Atlantic."—Howard Zinn, author of A People's History of the United States

Peter Linebaugh, professor of history at the University of Toledo, is author of The London Hanged. He lives in Toledo, Ohio. Marcus Rediker, associate professor of history at the University of Pittsburgh, is author of the award-winning Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea. He lives in Pittsburgh.