Transatlantic Literary Studies, 1660-1830

In “Transatlantic Romanticisms,” her chapter for this edited collection, Colleen Glenney Boggs asks a sequence of questions: (1) What is the impact of English authors and texts in America, and vice versa? (2) Does Romanticism foster a shared transatlantic culture, or generate national and regional specificity? ... (3) What are the gender politics of transatlantic Romanticism? (4) What is the importance of slavery and race ... for our understanding of transatlantic Romanticism? (5) How does this expand our understanding of transatlantic Romanticism beyond Anglo-American Romanticism? (p. 219) Replace “Romanticism” with one of the other chapter topics—for example, utopianism, literary journalism, captivity narratives—and her questions proffer a schema for reading the entire book. The collection's answers are rich and varied, and the essayists—themselves a transatlantic assembly—convince that national labels are contingent, as is transatlanticism itself. Anglophone readers, authors, printers, and booksellers of the long eighteenth century produced and consumed texts promiscuously, interpreting others' words and methods to suit their local, regional, national, and transnational interests. Tales of wonder and providence tales about monstrous births and other events in seventeenth-century New England, Jim Egan demonstrates, facilitated a “coherent” transatlantic community of “English peoples” and “differentiated” those people from “other categories,” internal and external (pp. 47–48). Eve Tavor Bannet's example of Jane Talbot (1801) recalls both Charles Brockden Brown's reliance upon British reprints to publish his novel in America and English publishers' reprinting of his novel as part of a domestic subgenre (p. 187). Moreover, transatlanticism was constitutive of a range of identities during the period, oftentimes in ways that initially appear at odds with national interests or that presage the future. Jeffrey H. Richards, in one of the last publications of his eminent career, declares, “For American playwrights in particular, American is transatlantic” (p. 104, emphasis in original). As Janet Sorensen explains in her analysis of literature of the ocean, transatlantic travel is “not simply a counterintuitive means of producing Englishness” but it also “invites various points of identification, [thereby] seemingly fostering the fluid sense of subjectivity associated with modernity itself,” which for some results in a “disinvestment from the interests of the landed world” and a “cosmopolitan” identity (pp. 126, 129, 136

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• Familial Feeling

  Open Access•Elahe Haschemi Yekani•Familial Feeling•2021

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• An Enemy Abroad

  Open Access•Clare Elliott, Clare Frances Elliott•Open Library of Humanities•2017

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• The Invisible Hand of the Literary Market

  Jennifer Scott•Nineteenth Century Contexts•2017

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