Category Archives

by Jennifer Clark

Arguing that American colonists who declared their independence in 1776 remained tied to England by both habit and inclination, Jennifer Clark traces the new Americans’ struggle to come to terms with their loss of identity as British, and particularly English, citizens. Americans’ attempts to negotiate the new Anglo-American relationship are revealed in letters, newspaper accounts, travel reports, essays, song lyrics, short stories and novels, which Clark suggests show them repositioning themselves in a transatlantic context newly defined by political revolution. Chapters examine political writing as a means for Americans to explore the Anglo-American relationship, the appropriation of John Bull by American writers, the challenge the War of 1812 posed to the reconstructed Anglo-American relationship, the Paper War between American and English authors that began around the time of the War of 1812, accounts by Americans lured to England as a place of poetry, story and history, and the work of American writers who dissected the Anglo-American relationship in their fiction. Carefully contextualised historically, Clark’s persuasive study shows that any attempt to examine what it meant to be American in the New Nation, and immediately beyond, must be situated within the context of the Anglo-American relationship.

by Ruth Livesey (Author), Ella Dzelzainis (Editor)

In nineteenth-century Britain, the effects of democracy in America were seen to spread from Congress all the way down to the personal habits of its citizens. Bringing together political theorists, historians, and literary scholars, this volume explores the idea of American democracy in nineteenth-century Britain. The essays span the period from Independence to the First World War and trace an intellectual history of Anglo-American relations during that period. Leading scholars trace the hopes and fears inspired by the American model of democracy in the works of commentators, including Thomas Paine, Mary Wollstonecraft, Alexis de Tocqueville, Charles Dickens, John Stuart Mill, Richard Cobden, Charles Dilke, Matthew Arnold, Henry James and W. T. Stead. By examining the context of debates about American democracy and notions of ’culture’, citizenship, and race, the collection sheds fresh light on well-documented moments of British political history, such as the Reform Acts, the Abolition of Slavery Act, and the Anti-Corn Law agitation. The volume also explores the ways in which British Liberalism was shaped by the American example and draws attention to the importance of print culture in furthering radical political dialogue between the two nations. As the comprehensive introduction makes clear, this collection makes an important contribution to transatlantic studies and our growing sense of a nineteenth-century modernity shaped by an Atlantic exchange. It is an essential reference point for all interested in the history of the idea of democracy, its political evolution, and its perceived cultural consequences.

by Martin Halliwell (Author)

First published in 1999, this engaging interdisciplinary study of romantic science focuses on the work of five influential figures in twentieth-century transatlantic intellectual history. In this book, Martin Halliwell constructs an innovative tradition of romantic science by indicating points of theoretical and historical intersection in the thought of William James (American philosopher); Otto Rank (Austrian psychoanalyst); Ludwig Binswanger (Swiss psychiatrist); Erik Erikson (Danish/German psychologist); and Oliver Sacks (British neurologist).

Beginning with the ferment of intellectual activity in late eighteenth-century German Romanticism, Halliwell argues that only with William James’ theory of pragmatism early in the twentieth century did romantic science become a viable counter-tradition to strictly empirical science. Stimulated by debates over rival models of consciousness and renewed interest in theories of the self, Halliwell reveals that in their challenge to Freud’s adoption of ideas from nineteenth-century natural science, these thinkers have enlarged the possibilities of romantic science for bridging the perceived gulf between the arts and sciences.

by Joselyn M. Almeida (Author)

In her thought-provoking study of Britain’s relationship with Latin America and the Caribbean during the Romantic and Victorian periods, Joselyn M. Almeida makes a compelling case for extending the critical boundaries of current transatlantic and circumatlantic scholarship. She proposes the pan-Atlantic as a critical model that encompasses Britain’s relationship to the non-Anglophone Americas given their shared history of conquest and the slave trade, and underscores the importance of writings by Afro-British and Afro-Hispanophone authors in formulating Atlantic culture. In adopting the term pan-Atlantic, Almeida argues for the interrelationship of the discourses of discovery, conquest, enslavement, and liberation expressed in literary motifs such as the New World, Columbus, and Las Casas; the representation of Native Americans; the enslavement and liberation of Africans; and the emancipation of Spanish America. Her study draws on the works of William Robertson, Ottobah Cugoano, Francisco Clavijero, Francisco Miranda, José Blanco White, Richard Robert Madden, Juan Manzano, Charles Darwin, and W. H. Hudson, uncovering the shared cultural grammar of travel narratives, abolitionist poems, novels, and historiographies that crosses national and linguistic boundaries.

by Sharon Alker (Author), Leith Davis (Author), Holly Faith Nelson (Editor)

While recent scholarship has usefully positioned Burns within the context of British Romanticism as a spokesperson of Scottish national identity, Robert Burns and Transatlantic Culture considers Burns’s impact in the United States, Canada, and South America, where he has served variously as a site of cultural memory and of creative negotiation. Ambitious in its scope, the volume is divided into five sections that explore: transatlantic concerns in Burns’s own work, Burns’s early publication in North America, Burns’s reception in the Americas, Burns’s creation as a site of cultural memory, and extra-literary remediations of Burns, including contemporary digital representations. By tracing the transatlantic modulations of the poet and songwriter and his works, Robert Burns and Transatlantic Culture sheds new light on the circuits connecting Scotland and Britain with the evolving cultures of the Americas from the late eighteenth century to the present.

The laying of the transatlantic cable in the 1850s sparked a revolution in communication. A message could travel from Newfoundland to Ireland in minutes, collapsing the space among continents, cultures, and nations. An eclectic group of engineers, entrepreneurs, politicians, and media visionaries then developed this technology into a telecommunications system that remade civilization. The desire to wire the world, though, was not shared by all.

This unusual history focuses not only on those who advanced cable communications, but also on those who harbored alternative ideas. These battles manifested in the cable wars, discourses on morality and violence, a rivalry between science and business, and the rise of strategic nationalism. They might seem peripheral, but such struggles determined the growth of cable technology, which in turn influenced world history. Filled with fascinating characters and new insight into defining events, this book recognizes globalization’s diverse paths and close ties to business and politics.

by Daniel Maudlin (Editor), Bernard L. Herman (Editor)

Spanning the North Atlantic rim from Canada to Scotland, and from the Caribbean to the coast of West Africa, the British Atlantic world is deeply interconnected across its regions. In this groundbreaking study, thirteen leading scholars explore the idea of transatlanticism–or a shared “Atlantic world” experience–through the lens of architecture, built spaces, and landscapes in the British Atlantic from the seventeenth century through the mid-nineteenth century. Examining town planning, churches, forts, merchants’ stores, state houses, and farm houses, this collection shows how the powerful visual language of architecture and design allowed the people of this era to maintain common cultural experiences across different landscapes while still forming their individuality.

By studying the interplay between physical construction and social themes that include identity, gender, taste, domesticity, politics, and race, the authors interpret material culture in a way that particularly emphasizes the people who built, occupied, and used the spaces and reflects the complex cultural exchanges between Britain and the New World.

by A. Ryrie (Editor), Tom Schwanda (Editor)

The stereotype of the emotionless or gloomy Puritan is still with us, but this book’s purpose is not merely to demonstrate that it is false. The reason to look at seventeenth-century English and American Puritans’ understanding and experience of joy, happiness, assurance, and affliction is to show how important the emotions were for Puritan culture, from leading figures such as Richard Baxter and John Bunyan through to more obscure diarists and letter-writers. Rejecting the modern opposition between ‘head’ and ‘heart’, these men and women believed that a rational religion was also a deeply-felt one, and that contemplative practices and other spiritual duties could produce transporting joy which was understood as a Christian’s birthright. The emotional experiences which they expected from their faith, and the ones they actually encountered, constituted much of its power. Theologians, historians and literary scholars here combine to bring the study of Puritanism together with the new vogue for the history of the emotions.

Exploring the literary microcosm inspired by Brontë’s debut novel, Jane Eyre’s Fairytale Legacy at Home and Abroad focuses on the nationalistic stakes of the mythic and fairytale paradigms that were incorporated into the heroic female bildungsroman tradition. Jane Eyre, Abigail Heiniger argues, is a heroic changeling indebted to the regional, pre-Victorian fairy lore Charlotte Brontë heard and read in Haworth, an influence that Brontë repudiates in her last novel, Villette. While this heroic figure inspired a range of female writers on both sides of the Atlantic, Heiniger suggests that the regional aspects of the changeling were especially attractive to North American writers such as Susan Warner and L.M. Montgomery who responded to Jane Eyre as part of the Cinderella tradition. Heiniger contrasts the reactions of these white women writers with that of Hannah Crafts, whose Jane Eyre-influenced The Bondwoman’s Narrative rejects the Cinderella model. Instead, Heiniger shows, Crafts creates a heroic female bildungsroman that critiques fairytale narratives from the viewpoint of the obscure, oppressed workers who remain forever outside the tales of wonder produced for middle-class consumption. Heiniger concludes by demonstrating how Brontë’s middle-class American readers projected the self-rise ethic onto Jane Eyre, miring the novel in nineteenth-century narratives of American identity formation.

Exploring the ways in which transatlantic relationships functioned in the nineteenth century to unsettle hierarchical models of gender, race, and national and cultural differences, this collection demonstrates the generative potential of transatlantic studies to loosen demographic frames and challenge conveniently linear histories. The contributors take up a rich and varied range of topics, including Charlotte Smith’s novelistic treatment of the American Revolution, The Old Manor House; Anna Jameson’s counter-discursive constructions of gender in a travelogue; Felicia Hemans, Herman Melville, and the ‘Queer Atlantic’; representations of indigenous religion and shamanism in British Romantic literary discourse; the mid-nineteenth-century transatlantic abolitionist movement; the transatlantic adventure novel; the exchanges of transatlantic print culture facilitated by the Minerva Press; British and Anglo-American representations of Niagara Falls; and Charles Brockden Brown’s intervention in the literature of exploration. Taken together, the essays underscore the strategic power of the concept of the transatlantic to enable new perspectives on the politics of gender, race, and cultural difference as manifested in late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain and North America.