Colonialism and Gender From Mary Wollstonecraft to Jamaica Kincaid

"Focusing On Antigua, Dominica, and England, this book contributes to post-colonial and cultural studies by juxtaposing British and Caribbean writers of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries." "Ferguson highlights usually veiled intersections between the texts of Mary Wollstonecraft, Jane Austen, Anne Hart Gilbert, Elizabeth Hart Thwaites, Jean Rhys, and Jamaica Kincaid, and underscores their feminist agendas in the context of slavery and colonialism." "Beginning with a discussion of Wollstonecraft's polemic for women's rights in the metropolitan center, Ferguson shows how that polemic linked colonial slavery to female subjugation and male desire. In the very different social context of Antigua, Gilbert and Thwaites engaged in struggles on behalf of literacy and abolitions." "In the doubled context of England and Antigua, Ferguson then examines the centrality of slavery to Austen's Mansfield Park, and concludes with a lively reading of texts by Jean Rhys and Jamaica Kincaid which display differing views of the British imperial project." "Colonialism and Gender from Mary Wollstonecraft to Jamaica Kincaid traces a discourse of struggle between writers and activists at the metropolitan center and those at the political periphery. "The continuum of their writings," notes Ferguson, "further suggests that during 150 years of slavery, emancipation, and postcolonialism, recognition of the link between gender and colonial relations became commensurately more clear.""--Jacket.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Fiction, Nonfiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.