new book – Teaching Transatlanticism

The Magnificent Reverend Peter Thomas Stanford, Transatlantic Reformer and Race Man Edited By Barbara McCaskill and Sidonia Serafini, with Paul Walker

on March 29, 2021

Hardcover| $39.95| Published June 15, 2020| 312 pages | ISBN 9780820356556

From the press: “Born into slavery in Hampton County, Virginia, orphaned soon thereafter, and raised for almost two years among Native Americans, the charismatic Rev. Peter Thomas Stanford (c. 1860-May 20, 1909) rose from humble and challenging beginnings to emerge as an inventive and passionate activist and educator who championed social justice. During the post- Reconstruction era and early twentieth century, Stanford traversed the United States, Canada, and England advocating for the rights of African Americans, including access to educational opportunities; attainment of the full rights and privileges of citizenship; protections from racial violence, social stereotyping, and a predatory legal system; and recognition of the artistic contributions that have shaped national culture and earned global renown. His imprint on working-class urban residents, Afro-Canadian settlements, and African American communities survives in the institutions he led and the works that presented his imaginative, literate, ardent, and often comic voice.

With a reflection by Highgate Baptist Church’s former pastor, Rev. Dr. Paul Walker, this collection highlights Stanford’s writings: sermons, lectures, newspaper columns, entertainments, and memoirs. Editors Barbara McCaskill and Sidonia Serafini annotate his life and work throughout the volume, placing him within the context of his peers as a writer and editor. As an American expatriate, Stanford was seminal in redirecting antislavery activism into an international antilynching movement and a global campaign to dismantle slavery and slave trading. This book squarely inserts this influential thinker and activist in the African American literary canon.”

The Forms of Informal Empire: Britain, Latin America, and Nineteenth-Century Literature by Jessie Reeder

on January 20, 2021

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From the press: “Spanish colonization of Latin America came to an end in the early nineteenth century as, one by one, countries from Bolivia to Chile declared their independence. But soon another empire exerted control over the region through markets and trade dealings—Britain. Merchants, developers, and politicians seized on the opportunity to bring the newly independent nations under the sway of British financial power, subjecting them to an informal empire that lasted into the twentieth century.

In The Forms of Informal Empire, Jessie Reeder reveals that this economic imperial control was founded on an audacious conceptual paradox: that Latin America should simultaneously be both free and unfree. As a result, two of the most important narrative tropes of empire—progress and family—grew strained under the contradictory logic of an informal empire. By reading a variety of texts in English and Spanish—including Simón Bolívar’s letters and essays, poetry by Anna Laetitia Barbauld, and novels by Anthony Trollope and Vicente Fidel López—Reeder challenges the conventional wisdom that informal empire was simply an extension of Britain’s vast formal empire. In her compelling formalist account of the structures of imperial thought, informal empire emerges as a divergent, intractable concept throughout the nineteenth-century Atlantic world.

The Forms of Informal Empire goes where previous studies of informal empire and the British nineteenth century have not, offering nuanced and often surprising close readings of British and Latin American texts in their original languages. Reeder’s comparative approach provides a new vision of imperial power and makes a forceful case for expanding the archive of British literary studies.”

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

on September 11, 2020

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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

on September 11, 2020

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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

on September 11, 2020

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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.”

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

on September 11, 2017

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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

New Book: Emily Dickinson’s Rich Conversation by Richard E. Brantley

on June 23, 2014

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From The publisher, “Emily Dickinson’s Rich Conversation explores the function of hope in Dickinson’s poems and looks to place her in a broad cultural context. Brantley teases out the implications of a succinct central perception by treating that perception as a pebble tossed into the pool of late-19th-century transatlantic culture. His departure from familiar stylistics and his challenging yet entertaining mode of analysis make for delightful reading.” – Paul Crumbley, Professor of English and Director of the Undergraduate American Studies Program, Utah State University, USA

New Book: Literature and Music in the Atlantic World, 1767-1867 by Catherine Jones

on June 18, 2014

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From Amazon.com: “This new study looks at the relationship of rhetoric and music in the era’s intellectual discourses, texts and performance cultures principally in Europe and North America. Catherine Jones begins by examining the attitudes to music and its performance by leading figures of the American Enlightenment and Revolution, notably Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson. She also looks at the attempts of Francis Hopkinson, William Billings and others to harness the Orphean power of music so that it should become a progressive force in the creation of a new society. She argues that the association of rhetoric and music that reaches back to classical Antiquity acquired new relevance and underwent new theorisation and practical application in the American Enlightenment in light of revolutionary Atlantic conditions. Jones goes on to consider changes in the relationship of rhetoric and music in the nationalising milieu of the nineteenth century; the connections of literature, music and music theory to changing models of subjectivity; and Romantic appropriations of Enlightenment visions of the public ethical function of music.”

New Book: The Poetics and Politics of Diaspora: Transatlantic Musings by Jerome C. Branche

on June 18, 2014

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From Amazon.com:“This book studies the creative discourse of the modern African diaspora by analyzing poems, novels, essays, hip-hop and dub poetry in the Caribbean, England, Spain, and Colombia, and capturing diasporan movement through mutually intersecting axes of dislocation and relocation, and efforts at political group affirmation and settlement, or “location.” Branche’s study connects London’s multimillion-dollar riots of 2011, and its antecedents associated with the West Indian settler community, to the discontent and harrowing conditions facing black immigrants to contemporary Spain as gateway to Fortress Europe. It links the brutal massacres that target Colombia’s dispossessed and displaced poor – and mainly black – “throwaway” citizens, victims of the drug trade and neoliberal expansionism, to older Caribbean stories that tell of the original spurts of capitalist greed, and the colonial cauldron it created, at the center of which lay the slave trade. In revisiting the question of what really has awaited Afro-descendants at the end of the Middle Passage, this volume brings transatlantic slavery, the making of weak postcolonial states that bleed people, and the needle’s eye of racial identification together through a close reading of rappers, black radicals, dub poetry, and novelists from Europe, Africa, and the Americas. Branche at once demonstrates the existence of an archive of Afro-modern diasporan, discursive production, and just as importantly, points toward a historically-rooted theoretical framework that would contain its liberatory trajectory.”

New Book: A Short History of Transatlantic Slavery by Kenneth Morgan

on June 18, 2014

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From Amazon.com: “From 1501, when the first slaves arrived in Hispaniola, until the nineteenth century, some twelve million people were abducted from west Africa and shipped across thousands of miles of ocean – the infamous Middle Passage – to work in the colonies of the New World. Perhaps two million Africans died at sea. Why was slavery so widely condoned, during most of this period, by leading lawyers, religious leaders, politicians and philosophers? How was it that the educated classes of the western world were prepared for so long to accept and promote an institution that would later ages be condemned as barbaric? Exploring these and other questions – and the slave experience on the sugar, rice, coffee and cotton plantations – Kenneth Morgan discusses the rise of a distinctively Creole culture; slave revolts, including the successful revolution in Haiti (1791-1804); and the rise of abolitionism, when the ideas of Montesquieu, Wilberforce, Quakers and others led to the slave trade’s systemic demise. At a time when the menace of human trafficking is of increasing concern worldwide, this timely book reflects on the deeper motivations of slavery as both ideology and merchant institution.”

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