Domestic Captivity and the British Subject, 1660-1750

Catherine Ingrassia is Professor of English at Virginia Commonwealth University and author of Authorship, Commerce, and Gender in Early Eighteenth-Century England: A Culture of Paper Credit.

An important book. It advances a cogent thesis that complicates our understandings of early modern culture and the roles of literature to both reinforce and subvert systems of oppression. It also calls attention to the importance of many underappreciated texts. Ingrassia's thoughtful, lucid study will no doubt invigorate the reading lists and discussion topics of many literature courses.-- "1650-1850: Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era" Ingrassia's Domestic Captivity is a significant and unexpectedly enlightening book in all sorts of ways. . . Ingrassia brings before readers texts they may not have encountered before and provides a perspective that may enable us to read other 18th-century texts in innovative ways relevant to our society today. These texts also shed some uncomfortable light on and provide an unexpected heuristic context for understanding some of the anomalies of popular and respected 21st-century texts.-- "The Eighteenth-Century Intelligencer" An original and necessary contribution to the field of eighteenth-century transatlantic studies. Ingrassia's book works to illuminate how pervasive and how complex these domestic conceptions of captivity were. At the same time, she contextualizes her accounts with a constant awareness of the presence of Atlantic plantation slavery as a backdrop and a point of comparison. --George Boulukos, Southern Illinois University, author of The Grateful Slave: The Emergence of Race in Eighteenth-Century British and American Culture