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This Open Access book, Crisis and Legitimacy in Atlantic American Narratives of Piracy: 1678-1865, examines literary and visual representations of piracy beginning with A.O. Exquemelin's 1678 Buccaneers of America and ending at the onset of the US-American Civil War. Examining both canonical and understudied texts-from Puritan sermons, James Fenimore Cooper's The Red Rover, and Herman Melville's "Benito Cereno" to the popular cross-dressing female pirate novelette Fanny Campbell, and satirical decorated Union envelopes, this book argues that piracy acted as a trope to negotiate ideas of legitimacy in the contexts of U.S. colonialism, nationalism, and expansionism. The readings demonstrate how pirates were invoked in transatlantic literary production at times when dominant conceptions of legitimacy, built upon categorizations of race, class, and gender, had come into crisis. As popular and mobile maritime outlaw figures, it is suggested, pirates asked questions about might and right at critical moments of Atlantic history.

Crisis and Legitimacy in Atlantic American Narratives of Piracy: 1678-1865

1. Introduction: The Pirate as a Figure of Crisis and Legitimacy

 

2. Pirate Narratives and the Colonial Atlantic         

2.1. The Buccaneer-Pirates: Articulations of Cultural Contact and Crisis, 1678-1699       

The Caribbean Scenario in the Late Seventeenth Century         

The Buccaneer in Literature: Points and Counterpoints             

The Caribbean Buccaneer-Pirate as an Embodiment of Crisis  

A. O. Exquemelin's Zee-Roovers/Buccaneers of America        

Attempts at Consolidation: Pirate-Scientists' Texts    

The Creole Pirate

2.2. Puritans and Pirates: The New England Anti-Piracy Sermon, 1700-1730    

Piracy in New England     

Cotton Mather's Anti-Piracy Sermons          

"to Direct the Course of Sea-men"

(Re-)Anglicization, Puritan Exceptionalism, Conversion          

Economies of Salvation    

"The Complicated Plot of Piracy": Hybridization, Resistance, Counterpoints      

The Gallows Literature of Piracy: "Let not the Lust of the Eye poison & pervert you!"     

 

3. Pirate Narratives and the Revolutionary Atlantic in the Early Republic and the Antebellum Period

3.1. Pirate Narratives and the Romance of the Revolution         

3.2. Crises of Authority and National Identity in James Fenimore Cooper's Red Rover (1827)         

Cooper's Maritime Nationalism

The Invention of Tradition: The Red Rover as Realist Romance              

Legal Ambivalence and Independence          

Crises of Authority and the Absent Presence of Slavery            

3.3. Cross-Dressing and Piracy in Lt. Murray's Fanny Campbell (1844)               

"Values and Virtues in Crisis"          

Popular Novelettes and Piratical Adventure 

Fanny: A Tale of the Revolution?   

Female Pirates and Cross-Dressing Women Warriors

"Crises Elsewhere": Class, Citizenship, Ethnicity, and Race    

Fanny, the Patriot

 

4. Cultural Constructions of Piracy during the Crisis over Slavery  

4.1. Entanglements: Piracy and Slavery         

From Exploration to Exploitation   

Barbary Pirate Narratives and U.S. Slavery  

4.2. Slavery and Piracy in the First Anglo-Caribbean Novel: M.M. Philip's Emmanuel Appadocca (1854)  

The Ship and Black Atlantic Literature          

The First Anglo-Caribbean Novel  

Slavery, Piracy, Legitimacy             

"A Literature of Revenge"

4.3. Piracy and Crises of Perception and Narration in Herman Melville's "Benito Cereno" (1855/56)            

Text and Contexts              

The Gray Atlantic: Narrating Epistemological Crisis  

Suspicion, Repression, and the Kaleidoscope of Piracy              

From the Black Atlantic to the Bleak Atlantic              

4.4. The Figure of the Pirate at the Onset of the Civil War        

The (Il)Legitimacy of Secession      

The 'Piracy' Cases of 1860/61        

Piracy on Union Envelopes              

The Iconography of Slavery and Piracy         

 

5. Coda