All seems dreary, savage and desert”
Janet Schaw’s Journal of a Lady of Quality and American dystopia
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 15086809 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Linda Van Netten Blimke (Concordia University, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2016 |
| Volume | 20 |
| Issue | 4 |
| Pages | 323-338 |
| Publication date | 2016-10-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Studies in Travel Writing (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1364-5145 • E-ISSN: 1755-7550 |
| Publisher | Informa UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/13645145.2016.1255299 |
| OpenAlex | W2583939875 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 26 |
Journal of a Lady of Quality (1774–1775) recounts Janet Schaw’s journey to the West Indies, North Carolina and Lisbon during the turbulent years leading up to the American Revolution. This article considers Schaw’s dystopic representation of America and the American colonists as a deliberate revision of common utopian visions and as a strategy to interrupt the sympathetic exchange between Britain and its American colonies. Positioned as a witness to the burgeoning Revolution, Schaw’s transatlantic travels allowed her to engage directly with the political ideologies shaping and emanating from the colonial crisis. In order to facilitate her British audience’s capacity to imagine American colonists as legitimate enemies rather than as loyal countrymen, she portrays American colonists both as irremediably foreign and as inherently violent. Her revision supports an aggressive British military response against the American colonists, which she believes is the only method by which Britain will retain its overseas Empire
Ancient history · Archaeology · Art · Art history · Colonialism · Dystopia · Empire · Ideology · Literature · Macabre · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Vision · Witness · American Constitutional Law and Politics · Anthropology · Historical Studies on Reproduction, Gender, Health, and Societal Changes · History · Law · Literature: history, themes, analysis
The sense of the people
Captives
The Theory of Moral Sentiments
An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations
Identity in British America
Sentimental Figures of Empire in Eighteenth-Century Britain and France
Slavery and the Politics of Place
Social Authorship and the Advent of Print
Colonists from Scotland
The Persistence of Empire
The Aesthetics of Colonialism
Complicating “Complicity/Resistance” in Janet Schaw's Journal of a Lady of Quality
Popular Politics and the American Revolution in England
The Island Race
Atlantic Families
British Abolitionism and the Rhetoric of Sensibility
The English Problem of Identity in the American Revolution
When London Was Capital of America
The Sense of the People
From Fellow-Nationals to Foreigners
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |