Publications [#384554] of Tye Landels

Essays/Articles/Chapters in Books

1. Landels, T, John Newton, Collective Shame, and the Repentant Imagination of British Abolitionism, Eighteenth-Century Studies, vol. 58 no. 4 (June, 2025), pp. 419-436, Project MUSE [doi]
   (last updated on 2026/01/19)

   Abstract:
   Abstract: This article argues for the significance of shame within British abolitionism. Close reading of the autobiographical writings of John Newton, an enslaver-turned-abolitionist and evangelical minister, reveals how changing ideas of shame shaped British responses to slavery in the late eighteenth century. I focus in particular on the idea of collective shame, through which Newton and other abolitionists claimed that slavery represented a source of shame for the entire British nation. Attending to Newton's sense of the shame of slavery, I show, yields fresh answers to longstanding historiographical questions about how (and whether) to account for the motivations of abolitionists.