Slavery, Empathy, and Pornography

This study considers the operations of slavery and of abolition propaganda on the thought and literature of England from the late-eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries. Incorporating materials ranging from canonical literatures to the lowest form of street publication, Marcus Wood writes from the conviction that slavery was, and still is, a dilemma for everyone in England, and seeks to explain why English society has constructed Atlantic slavery in the way it has.

Marcus Wood is a Reader in English and American Studies, at the University of Sussex.