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This chapter highlights some of the themes that distinguish ethical socialism from welfare liberalism as well as other strands of socialism. Several ethical socialists owed a distinctive debt to American romantics such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Walt Whit man. American romanticism initially entered British socialism through the wandering scholar Thomas Davidson, who inspired the Fellowship of the New Life. When Davidson continued on his travels, several of the socialists associated with the Fellowship took their ideals out of London and into the provinces. The most notable example was the libertarian poet Edward Carpenter, who set up the Sheffield Socialist Society and inspired numerous other local groups all across Britain, from Bristol to Nottingham and on to Bolton.

This chapter explores the relationship between old, new and American Romanticism and their ideas about the self, aesthetics, and nature. It recognises difference as in the economy of transatlantic literary and cultural exchange as, paradoxically, a marker of deviation, resistance and disinheritance and a sign of affinity, acceptance and inheritance. Emphasis is given here to the multiplicity of Romanticism(s), the fluidity of the self, the presence of nature and the operations of allusion as a marker of Romantic inheritance and disinheritance.

This chapter examines the translation of the image of the Arab into a “unique” expression of American romanticism, particularly in Edgar Allan Poe's oeuvre. In Poe, the figure of the Arab facilitates the experience of difference as sameness, the foreign as familiar, and the alien as domestic. In a sense, Poe cultivates the anxieties that are latent in the contact narrative's use of the image of the Arab to establish American national, cultural, and racial difference. Indeed, tracking the arabesque's movement from Arab cultural reference to uniquely American aesthetic demonstrates the role of translation in Poe's romanticism. Retranslating Poe's arabesque back into Arabo-Islamic cultural discourse, in turn, reveals resonance between Arab and American romanticism.

This chapter reads the thought and writing of Emerson and Thoreau as exhibiting a knowing self-consciousness about their treatment of self and nature and its use of allusion to the literary and cultural tradition of British Romanticism. What is offered is a fresh awareness of the intellectual and imaginative engagement of the thought of Emerson and Thoreau with the works of Byron, Shelley and Keats. The chapter also points up the affinities rather than the divisions between these two important American writers and their ideas about self and nature.

The final chapter, reaching up to the Civil War and its immediate aftermath, focuses on Ralph Waldo Emerson, mapping the wide expanse between his public image and private practice. Emerson, a celebrated icon of American exceptionalism and philosopher of American Romanticism, is here revealed also as America’s most prolific translator of Islamic verse, rendering more than two thousand lines of Persian poetry through German sources. Scribbled through diaries, letters, even on the backs of envelopes, Emerson’s early appeal to the Qur’ān, and his later translations of Sufi poets—especially Muḥammad Shamsuddīn Ḥāfiẓ—are shown to have shaped Emerson’s own poetic identity, while also promoting his posthumous legacy.

In this extended introductory essay, Catherine Gander and Sarah Garland suggest new ways of looking at the correspondences between visual and verbal practices to consider their material and conceptual connections in a specifically American set of histories, contexts and interpretive traditions. Tracing a lineage of experiential philosophy that is grounded in the overturning of a Cartesian mind/body split, the authors argue for pluralistic perspectives on intermedial innovations that situate embodied and imaginative reader-viewer response as vital to the life of the artwork. Gander and Garland chart two main strands to this approach: the pragmatist strain of American aesthetics and social politics, rooted in the essays of transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson and emanating from the writings of John Dewey and William James; and the conceptualist strain of French-American Marcel Duchamp, whose ground-breaking ideas both positioned the artwork as a phenomenological construction and liberated the artist from established methods of practice and discourse. The ‘imagetext’ (after W. J. T. Mitchell) is therefore, argue Gander and Garland, a site consisting of far more than word and image – but a living assemblage of language, idea, thing, cognition, affect and shared experience.

Washington Irving was a leading American Romantic, author of classic tales including “Rip Van Winkle” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.” Privately, however, he was also one of America’s earliest translators and transmitters of the Qur’ān. Chapter 3 establishes for the first time the wide extent, and the rich afterlife, of Irving’s Islamic studies. It reproduces selections from his manuscript Qur’ān renditions, as well as from Irving’s “Arabic Notebook,” a journal of Semitic language study reflecting his journeys in Andalucía. Held by the New York Public Library, Irving’s previously unpublished notes and notebooks testify to his domestic translation of Muslim sources into a distinctly American idiom spanning more than two decades, culminating with his 1850 romantic biography of the Prophet, Mahomet and his Successors.