Trembling Hand

Bracing and essential, a radical reframing of British Romanticism through the lens of Black experience – for fans of David Olusoga, Gretchen Gerzina, Saidiya Hartman and Emma Dabiri‘A masterpiece about how history is made, written with power and ferocity’ Boston GlobeWordsworth, Shelley, Byron, Keats – the Romantic poets are titans of English literature, taught and celebrated around the world. Their writings are associated with the sublime power of nature and revolutionary politics. But these literary icons also lived through the climax of the transatlantic slave economy. They witnessed both the explosion of the abolition movement - and the reactionary formation of white supremacist ideologies.The Trembling Hand examines how the lives and works of six major Romantic authors were entangled with the racial politics of their era. Mathelinda Nabugodi studies manuscripts and archival treasures – a teacup, a baby rattle, a lock of hair – to recover startling links between the poetry of freedom and the practices of slavery in the Romantic period.‘Urgent . . . One will never look at these poets in quite the same way’ The New York Times‘Ambitious and ingenious, Mathelinda Nabugodi engages the reader in the quest to re-see, re-imagine and re-read the past’ Colm Tóibín

Dr Mathelinda Nabugodi is a Lecturer in Comparative Literature at University College London. Previously she was a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellow in the Faculty of English at the University of Cambridge, where she researched the literary archive of Percy Bysshe Shelley, and a Research Associate in the Literary and Artistic Archive at the Fitzwilliam Museum.She completed her doctorate at UCL, where she was the first person ever to be awarded a PhD in Creative Critical Writing by the university, for her thesis on Shelley and Walter Benjamin. She is the author of Shelley with Benjamin: A Critical Mosaic, and has edited Shelley’s translations from Aeschylus, Calderón and Goethe for The Poems of Shelley, as well as the essay collection Thinking Through Relation: Encounters in Creative Critical Writing.The Trembling Hand is her first trade book. Its research was partly funded by a Whiting Creative Non-fiction Grant.