Transatlantic Stories and the History of Reading, 1720–1810

This book explores transatlantic stories about women, servants, slaves and the poor as read and rewritten in eighteenth-century Britain and America.

A study of popular eighteenth-century stories which shaped Britons' and Americans' views of the Atlantic world, and about how they were revised by printers and publishers for different readerships in different circumstances. It will be of interest to students of literature, history and Atlantic and transatlantic studies.Eve Tavor Bannet explores some of the remarkable stories about the Atlantic world that shaped Britons' and Americans' perceptions of that world. These stories about women, servants, the poor and the dispossessed were frequently rewritten or reframed by editors and printers in America and Britain for changing audiences, times and circumstances. Bannet shows how they were read by examining what contemporaries said about them and did with them; in doing so, she reveals the creatively dynamic and unstable character of transatlantic print culture. Stories include the 'other' Robinson Crusoe and works by Penelope Aubin, Rowlandson, Chetwood, Tyler, Kimber, Richardson, Gronniosaw, Equiano, Cugoano Marrant, Samson Occom, Mackenzie and Pratt.