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Part of
A Comparative Literary History of Modern Slavery: The Atlantic world and beyond
Edited by Karen-Margrethe Simonsen, Madeleine Dobie and Mads Anders Baggesgaard
[Comparative History of Literatures in European Languages XXXVII] 2025
► pp. 70–87

Chapter 5
Gothic tropes and displacements of slave rebellion in Matthew G. Lewis’s Journal of a West India Proprietor (1834)

Matthew G. Lewis adapts the literary forms and tropes of Gothic and sentimental traditions to examine the relationship between master and slave on his Jamaican plantations. This chapter argues that Lewis uses the Gothic in his Journal of a West India Proprietor (1834) to represent absentee landlordism in the colonies as a monstrous disavowal of white stewardship and responsibility that inevitably drives the enslaved people to a state of lawlessness and open rebellion. The analysis of Lewis’s article leads to a broader discussion of the role of Gothic literature on slavery in the Gothic literary canon and how the colonial Gothic underlines a shift in public attitudes towards revolution and blackness in the larger Age of Revolutions (1789–1848).
Keywords: colonial slavery, Matthew G. Lewis, Gothic, slave rebellion, absentee landlordism, paternalism
Article outline
  • Displacing the Gothic to a Caribbean setting
  • The Journal’s ‘Insider’ Account of Slavery
  • The Island of the Devil
  • Reversed slavery
  • Demonising black revolt
  • Politics of monstrosity
  • Gothic displacements: Removing rebellion in time and space
  • Justified or ungrateful retaliation?
  • Author queries
  • Notes
  • References
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References (32)
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