Conspiracy Theory: “Britannia’s Distant Shore”

Abstract

Chapter 1 addresses a multidisciplinary resistance to reading Wheatley and Milton together. Sifting through literary histories of Milton in early America and postcolonial studies of Wheatley in the context of transatlantic culture and African American literature, it discovers a deep-seated unease about bringing British (and especially Miltonic) literary tradition to bear on early American studies in general and African American or transatlantic cultural studies in particular. In response, the Chapter brings together a mix of revisionist history, protofeminism, early African American studies, intertextuality, pre-nineteenth-century cultural history, and Milton studies in order to lay a working foundation for understanding the epochal nature of Wheatley’s poetic achievement in Revolution-era Anglo-America.