Strangers in Blood: Relocating Race in the Renaissance - Hardcover

Jean E Feerick

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1442641401 ISBN 13: 9781442641402

Publisher: Toronto University Press, 2010

Synopsis

Strangers in Blood explores, in a range of early modern literature, the association between migration to foreign lands and the moral and physical degeneration of individuals. Arguing that, in early modern discourse, the concept of race was primarily linked with notions of bloodline, lineage, and genealogy rather than with skin colour and ethnicity, Jean E. Feerick establishes that the characterization of settler communities as subject to degenerative decline constituted a massive challenge to the fixed system of blood that had hitherto underpinned the English social hierarchy.

Considering contexts as diverse as Ireland, Virginia, and the West Indies, Strangers in Blood tracks the widespread cultural concern that moving out of England would adversely affect the temper and complexion of the displaced individual, changes that could be fought only through willed acts of self-discipline. In emphasizing the decline of blood as found at the centre of colonial narratives, Feerick illustrates the unwitting disassembling of one racial system and the creation of another.

About this title

About the Author

Jean E. Feerick is an assistant professor in the Department of English at Brown University.

Edition details

• Publisher: Toronto University Press
• Publication date: 2010
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1442641401
• ISBN 13: 9781442641402
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 272