Paradigms of Otherness. The American Savage in British Eighteenth-Century Popular and Scholarly Literature
Abstract
In this article, I trace the changes in the literary and material representations of the indigenous peoples of North America within the British sphere of cultural production. As a first example, I will give an account of the episode of the “Four Iroquois Kings” envoy at Queen Ann’s court in 1710, focusing on the resonance of such a historical encounter in popular texts and iconographic material. As a second example, I analyze the popular story of Inkle and Yarico included in Richard Steele’s The Spectator in 1711, showing its impact on the early Enlightenment reflections on colonial trade. In my conclusion, I examine the role of American natives in the scholarly works of the Scottish Enlightenment, in order to show how they were used as comparable types for the observation of the roots of European civilizations thus justifying the construction of the British imperial hegemony both geopolitical terms and discursive practice.
Keywords
American savages; public sphere; popular literature; Scottish Enlightenment; British Empire
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Sapienza Università di Roma Italy
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4645-5022
Federica Perazzini is Researcher in English Literature at University of Rome Sapienza where she currently teaches English Literature and Culture. Awarded a Fulbright Fellowship in 2011, she was visiting researcher at Stanford University where she joined Franco Moretti’s research group at the Literary Lab. Her main research interests involve the application of computational tools to the study of literary genres and cultural discourse analysis. Her pioneering dissertation, published in two volumes in 2013, is an example of computational criticism applied to the case study of the English gothic novel. Her latest research projects include the computational analysis of the emergence of modern subjectivity in the Long 18th Century (La Cifra del Moderno, 2019) and the publication of a study on the intersections between fashion and English literature titled Fashion Keywords (2017).
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