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Transatlantic Women Travelers, 1688-1843 edited by Misty Krueger

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Hardcover| $120.00| Paperback | $36.95 | Published March 12. 2021| 246 pages | ISBN 9781684482962

From the press: “This important new collection explores representations of late seventeenth- through mid-nineteenth-century transatlantic women travelers across a range of historical and literary works. While at one time transatlantic studies concentrated predominantly on men’s travels, this volume highlights the resilience of women who ventured voluntarily and by force across the Atlantic—some seeking mobility, adventure, knowledge, wealth, and freedom, and others surviving subjugation, capture, and enslavement. The essays gathered here concern themselves with the fictional and the historical, national and geographic location, racial and ethnic identities, and the configuration of the transatlantic world in increasingly taught texts such as The Female American and The Woman of Colour, as well as less familiar material such as Merian’s writing on the insects of Surinam and Falconbridge’s travels to Sierra Leone. Intersectional in its approach, and with an afterword by Eve Tavor Bannet, this essential collection will prove indispensable as it provides fresh new perspectives on transatlantic texts and women’s travel therein across the long eighteenth century.”

The Yellow Demon of Fever Fighting Disease in the Nineteenth-Century Transatlantic Slave Trade by Manuel Barcia

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Hardcover| $65.0 | Published in 2020 | 296 pages |  ISBN 9780300215854

From the press: “A pathbreaking history of how participants in the slave trade influenced the growth and dissemination of medical knowledge

As the slave trade brought Europeans, Africans, and Americans into contact, diseases were traded along with human lives. Manuel Barcia examines the battle waged against disease, where traders fought against loss of profits while enslaved Africans fought for survival. Although efforts to control disease and stop epidemics from spreading brought little success, the medical knowledge generated by people on both sides of the conflict contributed to momentous change in the medical cultures of the Atlantic world.

Manuel Barcia is chair of global history at the University of Leeds and a recipient of the Philip Leverhulme Prize in History.”

Romantic Education in Nineteenth-Century American Literature: National and Transatlantic Contexts edited by Monika M. Elbert and Lesley Ginsberg

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Paperback | $47.95 | Hardcover | $170.00 | Published in 2019 | 290 pages |  ISBN 9780367869984

From the press: “American publishing in the long nineteenth century was flooded with readers, primers, teaching-training manuals, children’s literature, and popular periodicals aimed at families. These publications attest to an abiding faith in the power of pedagogy that has its roots in transatlantic Romantic conceptions of pedagogy and literacy.

The essays in this collection examine the on-going influence of Romanticism in the long nineteenth century on American thinking about education, as depicted in literary texts, in historical accounts of classroom dynamics, or in pedagogical treatises. They also point out that though this influence was generally progressive, the benefits of this social change did not reach many parts of American society. This book is therefore an important reference for scholars of Romantic studies, American studies, historical pedagogy and education.”

Transatlantic Footholds: Turn-of-the-Century American Women Writers and British Reviewers by Stephanie Palmer

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Hardcover | Published in 2029 | 218 pages | $155.00 | ISBN 9780367204297 

From the press: “Transatlantic Footholds: Turn-of-the-Century American Women Writers and British Reviewers analyses British reviews of American women fiction writers, essayists and poets between the periods of literary domesticity and modernism. The book demonstrates that a variety of American women writers were intelligently read in Britain during this era. British reviewers read American women as literary artists, as women and as Americans. While their notion of who counted as “women” was too limited by race and class, they eagerly read these writers for insight about how women around the world were entering debates on women’s place, the class struggle, religion, Indian policy, childrearing, and high society. In the process, by reading American women in varied ways, reviewers became hybrid and dissenting readers. The taste among British reviewers for American women’s books helped change the predominant direction that high culture flowed across the Atlantic from east-to-west to west-to-east. Britons working in London or far afield were deeply invested in the idea of “America.” “America,” their responses prove, is a transnational construct.”

Contested Liberalisms: Martineau, Dickens and the Victorian Press by Iain Crawford

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Hardcover | Published in 2019 | 336 pages | $100.87 | £80.00 9.1 x 1 x 6.3 inches | ISBN  978-1474453134

From the press: “Focusing on the importance of Martineau’s contribution to the development of the early Victorian press, this book highlights the degree to which the public quarrel between her and Dickens in the mid-1850s represented larger fissures within nineteenth-century liberalism. It places Martineau and Dickens within the context of Anglo-American liberalism and demonstrates how these fissures were embedded within a transatlantic conversation over the role of the press in forming a public sphere essential to the development of a liberal society.”

CFP: Transatlantic Girlhood in Nineteenth-Century Literature Collection

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Although often dubbed “domestic” novelists, nineteenth-century women writers often featured girl protagonists who travelled, and much of the time this travel wasn’t relegated to a local or even national scale.  Rather, like Amy in Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, fictional girls on both sides of the Atlantic often journeyed abroad, usually with the intent of learning more about themselves, their relationships with others, and even their country.  This collection will interrogate both literal and metaphorical exchanges of culture that happened in nineteenth-century girls’ fiction.  Creative approaches to thinking about transatlantic travel and how it had an impact on girl culture in both Europe and America are invited.  For instance, contributors could explore novels like Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty, Maria Susanna Cummins’s The Lamplighter, and E.D.E.N. Southworth’s The Hidden Hand, all of which earned popularity in both Europe and America.  Likewise, the editors are eager to read submissions centering on girls’ magazines, journals, and etiquette books, so long as these were read in both Europe and America.

The book will comprise three sections: girl characters travelling, books travelling, and girl readers travelling. The first section will focus on how young female characters in novels approach and respond to travelling abroad, the second will consider how books were received and responded to on both sides of the Atlantic by the masses and critics alike, and the third section will examine how the books inspired their young readers to travel themselves and critically examine their cultural mores.

Interested contributors should send abstracts of 500 words (as an attachment in Word) and brief CV to Robin Cadwallader and LuElla D’Amico at transatlanticgirlhood@gmail.com. Abstracts are due by June 30, 2018, and authors will be notified of acceptance quickly after the deadline for submissions. Note that acceptance of the abstract does not guarantee acceptance of the article. First full drafts will be due January 15, 2019.

 

North American Victorian Studies Association Conference CFP

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The North American Victorian Studies Association is currently accepting proposals for the NAVSA 2018 conference to be held in St. Petersburg, FL Oct. 11-14, 2018.

From the NAVSA Website:

“The call for papers for NAVSA 2018 in St. Petersburg, Florida is now available on the conference website (http://navsa2018.english.ufl.edu). The deadline to submit proposals and panels is March 4, 2018. On the website, you will also find detailed information about St. Pete, the conference hotel, local activities, and conference updates.

The conference theme, “Looking Outward,” asks: What did the Victorians see, feel, and think as they looked beyond the borders of their time and place? We welcome broad interpretations of this theme. Our three plenaries: Erika Rappaport, Belinda Edmondson, and Sally Shuttleworth anchor three foci of the conference, and we hope there will be lively conversations on Caribbean Studies, Global Victorians, and Science/Medicine, even as the conference overall ranges more widely.

The conference will be held at the Hilton St. Petersburg Bayfront Hotel. The hotel is located in downtown St. Pete’s waterfront district and is only a short drive or bus ride to the beaches of the Gulf of Mexico. The St. Pete waterfront district features several museums, restaurants, and cultural attractions.

Questions can be directed to Sarah Kniesler, conference graduate student assistant: navsa2018@gmail.com

Finally, a reminder that all delegates must be NAVSA members, in addition to paying conference registration costs, at the time of the St. Pete conference. Please join or renew your NAVSA membership if necessary. “

Announcement: Transatlantic Anglophone Literatures, 1776-1920

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Dear colleagues in transatlantic teaching,

We are excited to share the news that Edinburgh University Press will be continuing to support growth in this exciting field of scholarship and pedagogy with publication of an anthology of primary texts.

A five-person editorial team has recently signed a contract to prepare Transatlantic Anglophone Literatures, 1776-1920. Andrew Taylor of Edinburgh University, along with Linda K. Hughes and Sarah R. Robbins of TCU, with associate editors Heidi Hakimi-Hood (a current TCU Ph.D. student) and Adam Nemmers (Lamar University) are already at work, with much-appreciated guidance from a talented advisory board of scholars.

Heidi and Adam were both enrolled in the 2013 seminar offering of  Linda and Sarah  (see our 2013 syllabus here). Students in the 2017 seminar—including our new web manager Sofia Prado Huggins—have given very helpful input to our planning for the project, which has also benefited from having Andrew Taylor visit with us at TCU in spring 2017, thanks to funding from two TCU internal grants.

In addition to familiar literary texts from the Caribbean, Canada, Great Britain, and the US, less well-known genres, authors, and media will be represented, including periodical and newspaper articles, letters, and illustrations.  In all cases, selections will feature not only a transatlantic topic but also an intersection across national borders.

We’ll keep you updated on our progress in the months ahead. We are all well aware that the preparation of anthologies is ambitious and time-consuming work, but we feel fortunate in having an active network of colleagues to offer encouragement, along with our board members. We anticipate a 2020 publication date.

Meanwhile, do visit this web space for updates and, via expanded sections of the website, digital, ready-for-teaching texts that will supplement those to be included in the eventual print anthology.

Advisory Board Members:

Jocelyn Almeida-Beveridge, University of Massachusetts, Amherst
Susan Castillo Street, King’s College, London
Clare Elliott, Northumbria University
Christopher Gair, University of Glasgow
Barbara McCaskill, University of Georgia
Ifeoma Nwankwo, Vanderbilt University
Clare Pettitt, King’s College, London
Jessie Reeder, Binghampton University
Joseph Rezek, Boston University
Fiona Robertson, St. Mary’s University, Twickenham
Marjorie Stone, Dalhousie University
Coll Thrush, University of British Columbia
Tom Wright, University of Sussex

The Political Poetess: Victorian Femininity, Race, and the Legacy of Separate Spheres by Tricia Lootens

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Hardcover | Published: 2016 | 344 Pages | $45.00 | £37.95 | 6 X 9.25 inches | ISBN: 9780691170312

For those whose interests center on transatlantic nineteenth-century poetry, Tricia Lootens’s The Political Poetess: Victorian Femininity, Race, and the Legacy of Separate Spheres (Princeton UP, 2016) is now essential reading, along with Meredith McGill’s The Traffic in Poems (2008) and Daniel Hack’s Reaping Something New (also 2016).  Her innovative book in fact has relevance for all those who are interested in transatlantic study and research methods.

Rather than viewing the poetess as being in retreat to an apolitical, patriotic private sphere of mourning and praise, Lootens demonstrates that the very premise of a decorous female separate sphere depends on profits resulting from racist violence (viz., slavery and imperial expansion) and is thus inherently riven, haunted, political.  Drawing upon Hegel’s theory of the internal enemy of the state (derived from a reading of Antigone), she also theorizes what she calls “suspended spheres,” “modeling,” according to the author, “a national sentimental ‘private sphere,’ conceived as a violently constructed, uneasily maintained sacred space at the heart of the State. As a realm of mortal subjection, mourning, and failed resistance, this sphere demands femininity’s protection; as a repository for eternal, individual love, it opens out onto eternity, investing feminine demands for the bodies of slain soldiers with a divine authority that supersedes statecraft” (personal communication).

Tricia Lootens also reveals the political poetess in historicist terms, by reading the pervasiveness of what she calls “Abolition time” (still ongoing because not yet fully resolved or remedied), given the deep involvement of multiracial British and American women in abolition  after the 1833 British Abolition act. Combined with her revised “sphere” theory, Lootens thus reframes affective lyrics by women poets as always intrinsically political.  As her own refrain goes, “Who made the Poetess white? No one, not ever.”  In a volume that offers as much to classroom teachers as to scholars, she opens up the poetess figure not only to transatlantic and transnational criss-crossing but also to connections with pressing issues today.

Individual chapters emphasize, among other poets, Felicia Hemans (in the contexts of race, slavery [“Bride of the Greek Isle”]), war [“Casabianca”]); Elizabeth Barrett Browning (in a bravura chapter on her “Curse for a Nation”); and—though reference to Harper threads throughout the book—Frances Harper (whose Aunt Chloe poems Lootens reads against Hemans’s “Switzer’s Wife” and whose oratory Lootens approaches as African American Poetess performance).  In every discussion throughout The Political Poetess, whether broad or highly specific, Tricia Lootens props open her own scholarly “sphere” to transatlantic literature and fundamental issues of social justice.  I enthusiastically recommend her book to all visitors to this site.

–Linda K. Hughes

The Edinburgh Companion to Atlantic Literary Studies– edited by Leslie Eckel and Clare Elliott

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Hardcover| Published: 01 November 2016 | 512 Pages | 3 b+w illustrations | 6.69 x 9.61 inches | ISBN: 9781474402941
This Companion offers a critical overview of the diverse and dynamic field of Atlantic literary studies, with contributions by distinguished scholars on a series of topics that define the area. The essays focus on literature and culture from first contact to the present, exploring fruitful Atlantic connections across space and time, across national cultures, and embracing literature, culture and society. This research collection proposes that the analysis of literature and culture does not depend solely upon geographical setting to uncover textual meaning. Instead, it offers Atlantic connections based around migration, race, gender and sexuality, ecologies, and other significant ideological crossovers in the Atlantic World. The result is an exciting new critical map written by leading international researchers of a lively and expanding field.