Transatlantic Literature and Transitivity, 1780-1850 Subjects, Texts, and Print Culture Routledge Studies in Nineteenth Century Literature Series

This book makes an important contribution to transatlantic literary studies and an emerging body of work on identity formation and print culture in the Atlantic world. The collection identifies the ways in which historically-situated but malleable subjectivities engage with popular and pressing debates about class, slavery, natural knowledge, democracy, and religion. In addition, the book also considers the ways in which material texts and genres, including, for example, the essay, the guidebook, the travel narrative, the periodical, the novel, and the poem, can be scrutinized in relation to historically-situated transatlantic transitions, transformations, and border crossings. The volume is underpinned by a thorough examination of historical and conceptual frameworks and prioritizes notions of circulation and exchange, as opposed to transfer and continuance, in its analysis of authors, texts, and ideas. The collection is concerned with the movement of people, texts, and ideas in the currents of transatlantic markets and politics, taking a fresh look at a range of canonical and popular writers of the period, including Austen, Poe, Crèvecoeur, Brockden Brown, Sedgwick, Hemans, Bulwer-Lytton, Dickens, and Melville. In different ways, the essays gathered together here are concerned with the potentially empowering realities of the transitive, circulatory, and contingent experiences of transatlantic literary and cultural production as they are manifest in the long nineteenth century.

CONTENTS

Introduction

Part I: Travelling Subjects and Transitive Identities

Chapter One: Romancing the Slave Trade; Or, Reformation in Mansfield’s Park

Elizabeth Fay

Chapter Two: ‘‘That Dreadful, Delightful City": Edgar Allan Poe and the Transatlantic Essaying of London

Simon Peter Hull

Chapter Three: "Humble Auxiliaries to Nature": Go-Betweens and Natural Knowledge in Crèvecoeur’s Journey into Northern Pennsylvania and the State of New York

Kathryn Gray

Chapter Four: Writing Pocahontas: Romantic Women Writers and the Transatlantic Rescuing Indian Maiden

Melissa Adams-Campbell

Part II: Ancient Decline and Nineteenth-Century Moralities

Chapter Five: The Politics of Disaster in Lydia Maria Child’s Philothea: A Grecian Romance (1837)

Matthew Duques

Chapter Six: Christian Morality and Roman Depravity: Illustrating Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s The Last Days of Pompeii (1834) in a Transatlantic Literary Market

Annika Bautz

Part III: Transatlantic Print Culture and Transitive Texts

Chapter Seven: Virtual Museums in Early America: Transatlantic Magazine Culture and Cultural Memory

Julia Straub

Chapter Eight: Cultural Transfer in the German Atlantic: Brown, Oertel, and the First Translation of a U.S. Novel

Leonard von Morzé

Chapter Nine: William Blake’s American Afterlives: Transatlantic Poetics in Emerson and Whitman

Clare Frances Elliott

Chapter Ten: American Notes and English Guidebooks: (Re)Writing English Literature in Melville and Dickens

Katie McGettigan and Diana Powell

Index

Annika Bautz is Associate Professor in English at Plymouth University, UK.

Kathryn N. Gray is Reader in Early American Literature at Plymouth University, UK.