News and Events

McGill-Queen’s University Press | 65.00 CAD | Published 2023 | 184 pages | ISBN 9780228014959

From the Press: “In the late nineteenth century a resurgent Jacobite movement emerged in Britain and the United States, highlighting the virtues of the Stuart monarchs in contrast to liberal, democratic, and materialist Victorian Britain and Gilded Age America. Compared with similarly aligned protest movements of the era–socialism, anarchism, nihilism, populism, and progressivism–the rise of Jacobitism receives little attention. Born in the Glorious Revolution of 1688, Jacobitism had been in steep decline since the mid-eighteenth century. But between 1880 and 1910, Jacobite organizations popped up across Britain, then spread to the United States, publishing royalist magazines, organizing public demonstrations, offering Anglo-Catholic masses to fallen Stuart kings, and praying at Stuart statues and tombs. Michael Connolly explains the rise and fall of Anglo-American Jacobitism, places it in context, and reveals its significance as a response to and a driver of the political forces of the period. Understanding the Jacobite movement clarifies Victorian Anglo-American anxiety over liberalism, democracy, industrialization, and emerging modernity. In an age when worries over liberalism are again ascendant, Jacobitism in Britain and the United States, 1880-1910 traces the complex genealogy of this unease.”

Ebook available through the TCU Library. Entry prepared by Ammie E. Harrison.

University of Massachusetts Press | Paperback $34.95 | Published 2023 | 320 pages | ISBN 9781613769652

From the press: “Examining the transatlantic writings and professional careers of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, this book explores the impact of literary, cultural, political and legal manifestations of authority on nineteenth-century British and American writing, publishing and lecturing. Drawing on primary texts in conjunction with a rich body of archival sources, this study retraces Romantic debates about race and nationhood, analyses the relationship between cultural nationalism and literary historiography and sheds light on Carlyle’s and Emerson’s professional identities as publishing authors and lecturing celebrities on both sides of the Atlantic.

During the antebellum period, British publishers increasingly brought out their own authorized and unauthorized editions of American literary works as the popularity of print exploded and literacy rates grew. Playing a formative role in the shaping of American literature, the industry championed the work of U.S.-based writers, highlighted the cultural value of American literary works, and intervened in debates about the future of American literature, authorship, and print culture.

The Transatlantic Materials of American Literature examines the British editions of American fiction, poetry, essays, and autobiographies from writers like Edgar Allan Poe, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Frederick Douglass, and Hannah Flagg Gould. Putting these publications into historical context, Katie McGettigan considers key issues of the day, including developments in copyright law, changing print technologies, and the financial considerations at play for authors and publishers. This innovative study also uncovers how the transatlantic circulation of these works exposed the racial violence and cultural nationalism at the heart of the American experiment, producing overlapping and competing visions of American nationhood in the process.”

Entry prepared by Ammie E. Harrison.

Oxford University Press | Hardcover $80.00 | Published 2021 | 218 pages | ISBN 9780192893383

“Many Americans’ first encounter with international modernism came, not on the page, but in person-through the widespread phenomenon of the US lecture tour. Attending to these encounters, Transatlantic Modernism and the US Lecture Tour reroutes our understanding of modernism away from the magazines and other mass media that have so far characterized its circulation and toward the unique form of cultural distribution that coalesced around the tour. 0Offering many new and compelling archival insights, this volume works across an admirably broad cultural and historical scope to reveal the US lecture tour as a primary mover of modernism. The study highlights the role this circuit played in the formation of transatlantic modernism by following a diverse group of authors-Oscar Wilde, W. B. Yeats, Rabindranath Tagore, Gertrude Stein, and W. H. Auden-on their whistle-stop tours across America, illuminating in the process how this extremely physical form of circulation transformed authors into object-like commodities to be sold in a variety of performance venues. Moreover, it shows how these writers responded to such wide-ranging distribution by stretching their own ideas about modernist authorship. In doing so, Transatlantic Modernism and the US Lecture Tour adds to a critical tradition of exposing those popular dimensions of modernism that far exceeded its standard coterie definition while also uncovering something else: how the circuit’s particular diversity of social contexts forced modernists to take on a new authorial flexibility that would allow them to make in-roads with practically any audience-elite, popular, and everything in between.”

Entry prepared by Ammie E. Harrison.

Penn State University Press | Hardcover $101.95 | Published 2020 | 3112 pages | ISBN 9780271083858

“Explores the theme of race in nineteenth-century transatlantic culture, focusing on how American concepts of race were intertwined with the ongoing cultural exchanges that Americans had with European artistic traditions.”

Entry prepared by Ammie E. Harrison.

Edinburgh University Press | Paperback $39.78 | Published 2021 | 414 pages | ISBN 9781474460415

“The first and only anthology dedicated to Douglass’s three journeys to Britain, covering oratory, print and visual culture. This critical edition documents Frederick Douglass’s relationship with Britain through unexplored oratory and print culture. With an unprecedented and comprehensive 60,000-word introduction that places the speeches, letters, poetry and images printed here into context, the sources provide extraordinary insight into the myriad performative techniques Douglass used to win support for the causes of emancipation and human rights.”

Entry prepared by Ammie E. Harrison.

Edinburgh University Press | Paperback $29.95 | Published 2021 | 328 pages | ISBN 9781474475402

From the Press “Reassesses American elitisms of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Brings together the insights of recent Victorianist and Americanist scholarship in order to show how Adams, James, and Wharton engage with liberal thinking about whiteness, democracy, and citizenship. Locates these authors in disciplinary history, revealing that their critical responses to Bostonian liberalism feed into the ideas that structure the study of US literary history during the twentieth century. Offers a rich portrait of the Harvard intellectual milieu to which these authors respond, bringing fresh attention to their connections with thinkers such as and W.E.B. Du Bois, Charles William Eliot, Charles Eliot Norton, and Barrett Wendell. Arguing that Henry Adams, Henry James and Edith Wharton articulated their political thought in response to the liberalism that reigned in Boston and, more specifically, at Harvard University, this book shows how each of these authors interrogated that liberalism’s arguments for education, democracy and the political duties of the cultivated elite. Coit shows that the works of these authors contributed to a realist critique of a liberal New England idealism that fed into the narrative about ’the genteel tradition’, which shaped the study of US literature during the twentieth century.”

Entry prepared by Ammie E. Harrison.

Bucknell University Press | $44.95 | Published 2020 | 262 pages | ISBN 9781684482016

From the Press “Recognizing distance as a central concern of the Enlightenment, this volume offers eight essays on distance in art and literature; on cultural transmission and exchange over distance; and on distance as a topic in science, a theme in literature, and a central issue in modern research methods. Through studies of landscape gardens, architecture, imaginary voyages, transcontinental philosophical exchange, and cosmological poetry, Hemispheres and Stratospheres unfurls the early history of a distance culture that influences our own era of global information exchange, long-haul flights, colossal skyscrapers, and space tourism.”

Anthem Press | £80.00 | Published 2020 | 230 pages | ISBN 9781785272844

“[The work] investigates Stevenson and the geographies of his literary networks during the last years of his life and after his death. It profiles a series of figures who worked with Stevenson, negotiated his publications on both sides of the Atlantic, wrote for him or were inspired by him. Using archival material, correspondence, fiction and biographies it moves across these literary networks. It deploys the concept of ’literary prosthetics’ to frame its analysis of gatekeepers, tastemakers, agents, collaborators and authorial surrogates in the transatlantic production of Stevenson’s writing.”

Entry prepared by Ammie E. Harrison.