Familial Feeling

Elahe Haschemi Yekani is Professor of English and American Literature and Culture with a Focus on Postcolonial Studies at the Department of English and American Studies at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Germany.

“Familiar Feelings critically reconsiders a variety of well-trod conceptual grounds commonly found in the literary and cultural analyses of the long eighteenth century … . Yekani has produced a marvelous monograph that proves to be in equal measures insightfully, originally, indispensably, and (as befitting her object of inquiry) confoundingly entangled. … Familial Feelings …offer an exemplary illustration of the enormous complexity of such a task in the present.” (Alpen Razi, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, Vol. 35 (4), 2023)“Haschemi Yekani’s ‘familial feeling,’ and thus exemplifies how these two monographs – indeed, all four discussed in this review – can profitably be read with and through one another. … Haschemi Yekani’s book is available online via SpringerLink as an ‘open access’ publication. … Much as one might be fond of hard-bound monographs … this mitigation of the economic and geographic barriers to Dickensian and other scholarship is clearly to be welcomed.” (Dominic Rainsford, Dickens Quarterly, Vol. 39 (3), September, 2022)“Familial Feeling is an essential contribution to the expanding spatiotemporal and generic matrix of how we understand the history of the novel and the repercussions of said history for our memorializations of Black history, writing, and belonging in contemporary Britain.” (Felipe Espinoza Garrido, Journal for the Study of British Cultures, Vol. 29 (1), 2022)

• 1. Introduction: Provincializing the Rise of the British Novel in the Transatlantic Public Sphere.- 2. Foundations: Defoe and Equiano.- 3. Digressions: Sancho and Sterne.- 3. Resistances: Austen and Wedderburn.- 4. Consolidations: Dickens and Seacole.- 5. Conclusion: Queering the Remembrance of Slavery Today.