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New book from CU Boulder professor explores the impact of literature about privilege and victimhood on our era

Literature is often touted as creating a more just and empathetic world鈥攂ut how should we tackle cases in which it doesn鈥檛?

That鈥檚 the question explored in Nicole Mansfield Wright鈥檚 new book, , published earlier this year. In it, Wright explores literature from 18th and early 19th century authors, and how it is used not to give a voice to the voiceless but rather to portray the privileged as the true victims in society.听

Wright found that these narratives, rather than disappearing, appear to have infected and influenced modern-day society in unseen and unacknowledged ways鈥攆rom who gets to hand out justice to whose testimony is believed.

鈥淥ne thing that literature does, and narratives do, is encourage what we (literary specialists) call the suspension of disbelief. Readers immerse themselves in fictions in the way that they don鈥檛 immerse themselves in, say, a textbook or manual. We鈥檙e supposed to leave skepticism at the door. 鈥� But, at the same time as you鈥檙e reading and you鈥檙e perusing, you鈥檙e being pumped full of these sometimes very noxious messages in ways that remain with us even after we鈥檝e closed the book and put it down and ventured back into the world,鈥� said Wright, an associate professor of English at the University of Colorado Boulder.

鈥淛ust like malware, they operate in the background even when you haven鈥檛 opened it consciously or chosen to access it. They鈥檙e still there in the background, affecting how your entire operating system is able to work.鈥�

This interpretation caught Wright off guard when she began this research for her dissertation in graduate school. Initially, Wright planned to focus on authors who 鈥渢ried to be a voice for the voiceless鈥� during the 18th century, which, she says, is the 鈥減eriod of time when all these modern liberation movements originated.鈥�

Instead, though, what she found were puzzle pieces that didn鈥檛 fit into her premise. In fact, quite the opposite was happening.

鈥淎t first I tried to just ignore it, and think, 鈥極kay, I鈥檓 just going to put this to the side, and I鈥檒l work it out later.鈥� But the evidence accumulated, and then that鈥檚 when I became fascinated with that evidence and began to take my book in a different direction.鈥�

In her book, Wright looks at prominent authors of the time, such as Walter Scott, Tobias Smollett and Charlotte Smith, as well as other little-known proslavery authors, and found that many themes and questions from these books still exist today.听

One such example is Smollett鈥檚 The Life and Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves. In that novel, the title character one day decides to don a suit of armor and go out to patrol the countryside, kicking out anyone he deems a troublemaker. Eventually, he even orders one of his minions to attack a mischievous drummer who intruded on his turf for a prank, paralyzing him for life.

鈥淚 see him as the original George Zimmerman (who killed Trayvon Martin) or Gregory and Travis McMichael (who killed Ahmaud Arbury). He鈥檚 a self-appointed neighborhood watchman who decides who鈥檚 an outsider and who鈥檚 an insider.鈥� Already in the 1700s, Wright says, 鈥渨e鈥檙e seeing this script that primes us to see privileged enforcers as the rightful bearers of justice and to conceptualize them as the heroes.鈥�

This story by Smollett isn鈥檛 an outlier, either.

鈥淥ne thing that my book really tries to convey is how these narratives can be normalized. That is, how we come to accept that our narratives are delivered from a distinct, privileged perspective, as the standard by which we should judge how rights should be apportioned, how rights should be conferred. Because so many of these novels were written from the perspective of the privileged and presented as victims, we as a society sometimes have a really skewed idea of what victimhood should look like or whose victimhood should be prioritized,鈥� said Wright.听

That same suspension of disbelief that affects readers of these novels can also cause today鈥檚 audiences to become vulnerable to biased media and disinformation, Wright continues.

鈥淚f we want to dislodge those narratives, we have to question and go back and reverse engineer how the appeal of that literature worked in the first place. Why was it so seductive to us? Why did so many readers gravitate towards these narratives? Because they continue to do so today.鈥�

One way to prevent the spread of these noxious narratives is not to disregard them, Wright commented, but rather to learn how to look at them with a critical eye. And those best primed to do this are among the first on the chopping block at most universities: humanists and literary scholars.

鈥淧art of our (literary scholars鈥�) worth is to help heal our society by cluing people into how these harmful and racist narratives work,鈥� Wright said.

鈥淚 think this is an opportunity for us to use this crisis moment to make society a more thoughtful place to be.鈥�