Heidi Slettedahl Macpherson
- Published in print:
- 2008
- Published Online:
- March 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780748624454
- eISBN:
- 9780748652242
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748624454.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Women's Literature
This book contributes to the evolving debate surrounding Transatlantic Studies and transatlantic literature. It focuses on twentieth-century women's narratives of travel and adventure, and their ...
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This book contributes to the evolving debate surrounding Transatlantic Studies and transatlantic literature. It focuses on twentieth-century women's narratives of travel and adventure, and their deliberate expansion of the Transatlantic concept beyond the familiar US–UK axis to include Canada, South America, the Caribbean and Eastern Europe. The crisscrossing of the Atlantic is contested and problematised throughout. The book explores culturally resonant literature that imagines ‘views from both sides’ and examines the imaginary, ‘in-between’ space of the Atlantic. It offers a considered exploration of the way in which the space of the Atlantic and women's space work together in the construction of meaning in transatlantic texts. Focusing on contemporary literature, the book engages with a range of texts, from novellas and novels to essays, memoirs and travel literature. Nella Larsen's Quicksand is read alongside Bharati Mukherjee's Jasmine in relation to constructions of the exotic; Eva Hoffman's Lost in Translation is explored in relation to travel memoirs such as Jenny Diski's Skating to Antarctica and Stranger on a Train; and Anne Tyler's transatlantic novel The Accidental Tourist is read alongside her latest transpacific novel, Digging to America, and Isabel Allende's Daughter of Fortune. Readers will gain an appreciation of the complexity of transatlantic narratives and the ways in which they are defined by, and infused with, gender considerations.Less
This book contributes to the evolving debate surrounding Transatlantic Studies and transatlantic literature. It focuses on twentieth-century women's narratives of travel and adventure, and their deliberate expansion of the Transatlantic concept beyond the familiar US–UK axis to include Canada, South America, the Caribbean and Eastern Europe. The crisscrossing of the Atlantic is contested and problematised throughout. The book explores culturally resonant literature that imagines ‘views from both sides’ and examines the imaginary, ‘in-between’ space of the Atlantic. It offers a considered exploration of the way in which the space of the Atlantic and women's space work together in the construction of meaning in transatlantic texts. Focusing on contemporary literature, the book engages with a range of texts, from novellas and novels to essays, memoirs and travel literature. Nella Larsen's Quicksand is read alongside Bharati Mukherjee's Jasmine in relation to constructions of the exotic; Eva Hoffman's Lost in Translation is explored in relation to travel memoirs such as Jenny Diski's Skating to Antarctica and Stranger on a Train; and Anne Tyler's transatlantic novel The Accidental Tourist is read alongside her latest transpacific novel, Digging to America, and Isabel Allende's Daughter of Fortune. Readers will gain an appreciation of the complexity of transatlantic narratives and the ways in which they are defined by, and infused with, gender considerations.
Samantha C. Harvey
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- January 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780748681365
- eISBN:
- 9780748693887
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748681365.003.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 19th Century Literature
Chapter 1 elaborates the three categories of this book's title, beginning with the unique case of assimilative influence at work in the relationship between Coleridge and Emerson. This will be ...
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Chapter 1 elaborates the three categories of this book's title, beginning with the unique case of assimilative influence at work in the relationship between Coleridge and Emerson. This will be followed by an examination of how the burgeoning field of transatlantic studies has opened new circulatory spaces to investigate Transatlantic Transcendentalism, and finally, an account of how Coleridge's commitment to mediating the categories of nature, spirit, and humanity characterized an overarching Romantic concern that transcended national boundaries. Thus this book is not just an “influence study” of one writer upon another, but rather the relationship between Coleridge and Emerson serves as a lens to magnify the ways in which ideas transferred across thinkers, oceans, and time periods, on one hand forging enduring legacies while also warping, reinterpreting, and renewing those ideas in new climates.Less
Chapter 1 elaborates the three categories of this book's title, beginning with the unique case of assimilative influence at work in the relationship between Coleridge and Emerson. This will be followed by an examination of how the burgeoning field of transatlantic studies has opened new circulatory spaces to investigate Transatlantic Transcendentalism, and finally, an account of how Coleridge's commitment to mediating the categories of nature, spirit, and humanity characterized an overarching Romantic concern that transcended national boundaries. Thus this book is not just an “influence study” of one writer upon another, but rather the relationship between Coleridge and Emerson serves as a lens to magnify the ways in which ideas transferred across thinkers, oceans, and time periods, on one hand forging enduring legacies while also warping, reinterpreting, and renewing those ideas in new climates.
Heidi Slettedahl Macpherson
- Published in print:
- 2008
- Published Online:
- March 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780748624454
- eISBN:
- 9780748652242
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748624454.003.0011
- Subject:
- Literature, Women's Literature
This concluding chapter sums up the key findings of this study on transatlantic literature and women's narratives of travel and adventure. It suggests that fictional travel narratives, like their ...
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This concluding chapter sums up the key findings of this study on transatlantic literature and women's narratives of travel and adventure. It suggests that fictional travel narratives, like their factual counterparts, provide accounts of difference by exploring the politics of location while simultaneously examining localities. What all of the travel narratives explored in this book have in common is a sense that gender is a condition which impinges upon – even determines – the travel experience. The texts of the narratives all contribute to the evolving definitions of transatlantic literature, with important implications for the continued development of Transatlantic Studies as a theorised space.Less
This concluding chapter sums up the key findings of this study on transatlantic literature and women's narratives of travel and adventure. It suggests that fictional travel narratives, like their factual counterparts, provide accounts of difference by exploring the politics of location while simultaneously examining localities. What all of the travel narratives explored in this book have in common is a sense that gender is a condition which impinges upon – even determines – the travel experience. The texts of the narratives all contribute to the evolving definitions of transatlantic literature, with important implications for the continued development of Transatlantic Studies as a theorised space.
Philip Gould
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- May 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780199967896
- eISBN:
- 9780199346073
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199967896.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, American Colonial Literature, American, 18th Century and Early American Literature
Why has Revolutionary literary studies largely ignored the writings of those who opposed the American Rebellion? This study of the literature of politics reconsiders the place of the British American ...
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Why has Revolutionary literary studies largely ignored the writings of those who opposed the American Rebellion? This study of the literature of politics reconsiders the place of the British American Loyalists in early American literary history. By imagining the Revolution as an episode in transatlantic literary history, it explores the relations between aesthetics and politics during a crucial transitional period in which both Loyalists and Patriots were redefining their respective relations to “English” culture. Rather than pointing the ambivalence expressed by Loyalists writings, however, it argues for the dislocation and alienation Loyalists experienced, and thereby challenges the traditional image of this group as the only true Anglophiles in British America. Each chapter goes on to discuss an important literary and aesthetic form that shaped—and was shaped by—Revolutionary politics. It recasts the literature of politics as the place where British Americans were also working out their cultural identities and identifications with the British nation.Less
Why has Revolutionary literary studies largely ignored the writings of those who opposed the American Rebellion? This study of the literature of politics reconsiders the place of the British American Loyalists in early American literary history. By imagining the Revolution as an episode in transatlantic literary history, it explores the relations between aesthetics and politics during a crucial transitional period in which both Loyalists and Patriots were redefining their respective relations to “English” culture. Rather than pointing the ambivalence expressed by Loyalists writings, however, it argues for the dislocation and alienation Loyalists experienced, and thereby challenges the traditional image of this group as the only true Anglophiles in British America. Each chapter goes on to discuss an important literary and aesthetic form that shaped—and was shaped by—Revolutionary politics. It recasts the literature of politics as the place where British Americans were also working out their cultural identities and identifications with the British nation.
Tara Stubbs
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- September 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780719084331
- eISBN:
- 9781781705841
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9780719084331.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century Literature and Romanticism
American literature and Irish culture, 1910-1955: the politics of enchantment discusses how and why American modernist writers turned to Ireland at various stages during their careers. By placing ...
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American literature and Irish culture, 1910-1955: the politics of enchantment discusses how and why American modernist writers turned to Ireland at various stages during their careers. By placing events such as the Celtic Revival and the Easter Rising at the centre of the discussion, it shows how Irishness became a cultural determinant in the work of American modernists. Each chapter deals with a different source of influence, considering the impact of family, the Celtic Revival, rural mythmaking, nationalist politics and the work of W. B. Yeats on American modernists’ writings. It is the first study to extend the analysis of Irish influence on American literature beyond racial, ethnic or national frameworks. Through close readings, a sustained focus on individual writers, and in-depth archival research, American literature and Irish culture, 1910-1955 provides a balanced and structured approach to the study of the complexities of American modernist writers’ responses to Ireland. Offering new readings of familiar literary figures – including Fitzgerald, Moore, O’Neill, Steinbeck and Stevens – it makes for essential reading for students and academics working on twentieth-century American and Irish literature and culture, and transatlantic studies.Less
American literature and Irish culture, 1910-1955: the politics of enchantment discusses how and why American modernist writers turned to Ireland at various stages during their careers. By placing events such as the Celtic Revival and the Easter Rising at the centre of the discussion, it shows how Irishness became a cultural determinant in the work of American modernists. Each chapter deals with a different source of influence, considering the impact of family, the Celtic Revival, rural mythmaking, nationalist politics and the work of W. B. Yeats on American modernists’ writings. It is the first study to extend the analysis of Irish influence on American literature beyond racial, ethnic or national frameworks. Through close readings, a sustained focus on individual writers, and in-depth archival research, American literature and Irish culture, 1910-1955 provides a balanced and structured approach to the study of the complexities of American modernist writers’ responses to Ireland. Offering new readings of familiar literary figures – including Fitzgerald, Moore, O’Neill, Steinbeck and Stevens – it makes for essential reading for students and academics working on twentieth-century American and Irish literature and culture, and transatlantic studies.
Heike Scharm and Natalia Matta-Jara (eds)
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- May 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780813054940
- eISBN:
- 9780813053356
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University Press of Florida
- DOI:
- 10.5744/florida/9780813054940.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
This collective volume addresses the current paradigm shift in the humanities (from national literatures toward crosscultural encounters) by exploring how postnational perspectives have an effect on ...
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This collective volume addresses the current paradigm shift in the humanities (from national literatures toward crosscultural encounters) by exploring how postnational perspectives have an effect on Hispanic literature and literary theory in the “Global Now” (Appadurai), as crystallized within a new “world literature” written by Latin American, U.S., and Spanish writers. The contributing authors are scholars from the U.S., Latin America, and Europe, who have examined the impact of globalization on Hispanic literature within their respective fields: postcolonial, Latino, gender, exile, and transatlantic studies. The shared focus of postnational perspectives ensures the cohesion and coherence of the volume while also providing enough common ground for a fertile interdisciplinary and transatlantic dialogue between the chapters. The varying angles from which the contributing authors interpret and apply the postnational position to works of contemporary Hispanic literature show how changing worldviews lead to a new understanding of memory, belonging, and identity, as well as of a new “world” literature. Less
This collective volume addresses the current paradigm shift in the humanities (from national literatures toward crosscultural encounters) by exploring how postnational perspectives have an effect on Hispanic literature and literary theory in the “Global Now” (Appadurai), as crystallized within a new “world literature” written by Latin American, U.S., and Spanish writers. The contributing authors are scholars from the U.S., Latin America, and Europe, who have examined the impact of globalization on Hispanic literature within their respective fields: postcolonial, Latino, gender, exile, and transatlantic studies. The shared focus of postnational perspectives ensures the cohesion and coherence of the volume while also providing enough common ground for a fertile interdisciplinary and transatlantic dialogue between the chapters. The varying angles from which the contributing authors interpret and apply the postnational position to works of contemporary Hispanic literature show how changing worldviews lead to a new understanding of memory, belonging, and identity, as well as of a new “world” literature.
Catherine Jones
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- September 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780748684618
- eISBN:
- 9781474406369
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748684618.003.0006
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century Literature and Romanticism
The introduction outlines the scope and methodology of this book, with particular reference to Thomas Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia (1785); William Billings's The New-England ...
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The introduction outlines the scope and methodology of this book, with particular reference to Thomas Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia (1785); William Billings's The New-England Psalm-Singer (1770); and Benjamin Franklin's ‘The Ephemera’ (1778). It situates the book in relation to recent work in the fields of transatlantic literary studies, Atlantic history, musicology, and literature and music.Less
The introduction outlines the scope and methodology of this book, with particular reference to Thomas Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia (1785); William Billings's The New-England Psalm-Singer (1770); and Benjamin Franklin's ‘The Ephemera’ (1778). It situates the book in relation to recent work in the fields of transatlantic literary studies, Atlantic history, musicology, and literature and music.
Brittany P. Kennedy
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- May 2016
- ISBN:
- 9781628461978
- eISBN:
- 9781626744943
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University Press of Mississippi
- DOI:
- 10.14325/mississippi/9781628461978.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
For centuries, Spain and the South have existed on the margins of U.S. and European identities—as much for the Francoist and Jim Crow periods as for their “exotic” cultures and sunny beaches ...
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For centuries, Spain and the South have existed on the margins of U.S. and European identities—as much for the Francoist and Jim Crow periods as for their “exotic” cultures and sunny beaches attractive to tourists worldwide. Between Distant Modernities theorizes this trans-Atlantic link to show exactly how Spanish and Southern exceptionality became a performance developed as a specific response to modernity, and its perceived threat of homogenization, in the United States and Europe across the twentieth century. Seeing the War of 1898 as a climactic moment, this book begins by exploring the writings of the Nashville Agrarians and members of the so-called Generation of 1898, who each tried to regenerate a “traditional” Spain and South located in an agrarian past. That desire is constantly re-enacted by main characters in cultural production across the twentieth century as these characters simultaneously enact and problematize the issue of self/other, exile/citizen, and tourist/native that dominate both literary traditions.Less
For centuries, Spain and the South have existed on the margins of U.S. and European identities—as much for the Francoist and Jim Crow periods as for their “exotic” cultures and sunny beaches attractive to tourists worldwide. Between Distant Modernities theorizes this trans-Atlantic link to show exactly how Spanish and Southern exceptionality became a performance developed as a specific response to modernity, and its perceived threat of homogenization, in the United States and Europe across the twentieth century. Seeing the War of 1898 as a climactic moment, this book begins by exploring the writings of the Nashville Agrarians and members of the so-called Generation of 1898, who each tried to regenerate a “traditional” Spain and South located in an agrarian past. That desire is constantly re-enacted by main characters in cultural production across the twentieth century as these characters simultaneously enact and problematize the issue of self/other, exile/citizen, and tourist/native that dominate both literary traditions.
Christopher Hanlon
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- May 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780199937585
- eISBN:
- 9780199333103
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199937585.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 18th Century and Early American Literature, Criticism/Theory
America’s England examines the patterns of affiliation through which U.S. writers, public intellectuals, politicians, and aesthetes encoded the political turmoil of antebellum America in ...
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America’s England examines the patterns of affiliation through which U.S. writers, public intellectuals, politicians, and aesthetes encoded the political turmoil of antebellum America in a transatlantic constellation. Demonstrating that English genealogies, geographies, and economics encoded the sectional crisis for antebellum Americans on both sides of the Mason-Dixon, it locates many of the crisis points of 1830s, 40s, 50s, and 60s America in a broader cisatlantic struggle over transatlantic connection. Through engagement with contemporaneous renditions of English race, history, landscape aesthetics, transatlantic telecommunications, and free trade discourses, northern and southern partisans—abolitionists, Unionists, and slaveholders alike—re-imagined the terms of the conflict, forming a transatlantic surround for the otherwise irreducibly cisatlantic political struggles that would dissolve the Union in 1861. This re-conceptualization of sectional issues in transatlantic terms undermined the notion that white citizens of the United States formed a unified biological or cultural community, effectively polarizing the imagined ethnic and cultural bases of the American polity. Moreover, a continued reference to English historical, cultural, and political formations allowed public intellectuals and authors such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Frederick Douglass, Lydia Maria Child, Nathaniel Hawthorne, William Gilmore Simms, John Pendleton Kennedy, Charles Sumner, and Henry Herbert, to situate an era of developing national acrimony along longer historical and transnational curves, forming an account of national crisis that situated questions of a domestic political bearing at transatlantic remove from northern and southern combatants.Less
America’s England examines the patterns of affiliation through which U.S. writers, public intellectuals, politicians, and aesthetes encoded the political turmoil of antebellum America in a transatlantic constellation. Demonstrating that English genealogies, geographies, and economics encoded the sectional crisis for antebellum Americans on both sides of the Mason-Dixon, it locates many of the crisis points of 1830s, 40s, 50s, and 60s America in a broader cisatlantic struggle over transatlantic connection. Through engagement with contemporaneous renditions of English race, history, landscape aesthetics, transatlantic telecommunications, and free trade discourses, northern and southern partisans—abolitionists, Unionists, and slaveholders alike—re-imagined the terms of the conflict, forming a transatlantic surround for the otherwise irreducibly cisatlantic political struggles that would dissolve the Union in 1861. This re-conceptualization of sectional issues in transatlantic terms undermined the notion that white citizens of the United States formed a unified biological or cultural community, effectively polarizing the imagined ethnic and cultural bases of the American polity. Moreover, a continued reference to English historical, cultural, and political formations allowed public intellectuals and authors such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Frederick Douglass, Lydia Maria Child, Nathaniel Hawthorne, William Gilmore Simms, John Pendleton Kennedy, Charles Sumner, and Henry Herbert, to situate an era of developing national acrimony along longer historical and transnational curves, forming an account of national crisis that situated questions of a domestic political bearing at transatlantic remove from northern and southern combatants.
Juliet Shields
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- December 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780190272555
- eISBN:
- 9780190272579
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190272555.003.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 19th Century Literature, 19th-century Literature and Romanticism
The introduction describes the limitations of the Anglocentric focus of transatlantic literary studies, and argues that including the literatures of the British archipelago (Scotland, Ireland, and ...
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The introduction describes the limitations of the Anglocentric focus of transatlantic literary studies, and argues that including the literatures of the British archipelago (Scotland, Ireland, and Wales) in this field of study provides a richer and more accurate picture of the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Atlantic world. Most significantly, this picture shows that transatlantic migration impacted British literature and British nation formation as much as it did American literature and American nation formation. The introduction explains the aims of archipelagic criticism, surveys recent work on the transatlantic literature of migration, and outlines the scope and organization of the book.Less
The introduction describes the limitations of the Anglocentric focus of transatlantic literary studies, and argues that including the literatures of the British archipelago (Scotland, Ireland, and Wales) in this field of study provides a richer and more accurate picture of the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Atlantic world. Most significantly, this picture shows that transatlantic migration impacted British literature and British nation formation as much as it did American literature and American nation formation. The introduction explains the aims of archipelagic criticism, surveys recent work on the transatlantic literature of migration, and outlines the scope and organization of the book.
Annette G. Aubert
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- September 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780199915323
- eISBN:
- 9780199345540
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199915323.003.0001
- Subject:
- Religion, Religion and Literature
After introducing the purpose, importance, and approach of this book, the argument is made that nineteenth-century Reformed theology in America can be more accurately understood when interpreted in a ...
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After introducing the purpose, importance, and approach of this book, the argument is made that nineteenth-century Reformed theology in America can be more accurately understood when interpreted in a European theological context. The influence of German theology was especially important for some strands of Reformed theology (e.g., scholars working at Mercersburg and Princeton seminaries). Thus, the introduction discusses the scholarship of that period in terms of American-European relations, and identifies two historical approaches—one that positions American religious thought in a national intellectual context, and one oriented toward a transatlantic intellectual perspective.Less
After introducing the purpose, importance, and approach of this book, the argument is made that nineteenth-century Reformed theology in America can be more accurately understood when interpreted in a European theological context. The influence of German theology was especially important for some strands of Reformed theology (e.g., scholars working at Mercersburg and Princeton seminaries). Thus, the introduction discusses the scholarship of that period in terms of American-European relations, and identifies two historical approaches—one that positions American religious thought in a national intellectual context, and one oriented toward a transatlantic intellectual perspective.
Christopher Hanlon
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- May 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780199937585
- eISBN:
- 9780199333103
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199937585.003.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 18th Century and Early American Literature, Criticism/Theory
My introduction, “Striking Roots,” takes up Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Our Old Home (1863), where Hawthorne muses over his own process of re-nativization during his four years as U.S. Consul to Liverpool ...
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My introduction, “Striking Roots,” takes up Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Our Old Home (1863), where Hawthorne muses over his own process of re-nativization during his four years as U.S. Consul to Liverpool (1853-57). Hawthorne’s memoir followed his effort, after the end of his consular term, to write a romance around what Our Old Home describes as a broadly-held fantasy nurtured by many Americans who seek to invigorate lost English ties. Such manoeuvres as Hawthorne’s, I suggest, articulate the questions that motivate the chapters to follow: What can it mean for citizens of a nation less than eighty years old to transfigure regional and American affiliations as attachments to heredities located in England? More pressingly, how do such “ancient” American lines triangulate with a more ancient mother country out of whose genealogies these latter lines branch, and hence wherein—we might suppose—all such Anglo-American lineages must otherwise resolve themselves?Less
My introduction, “Striking Roots,” takes up Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Our Old Home (1863), where Hawthorne muses over his own process of re-nativization during his four years as U.S. Consul to Liverpool (1853-57). Hawthorne’s memoir followed his effort, after the end of his consular term, to write a romance around what Our Old Home describes as a broadly-held fantasy nurtured by many Americans who seek to invigorate lost English ties. Such manoeuvres as Hawthorne’s, I suggest, articulate the questions that motivate the chapters to follow: What can it mean for citizens of a nation less than eighty years old to transfigure regional and American affiliations as attachments to heredities located in England? More pressingly, how do such “ancient” American lines triangulate with a more ancient mother country out of whose genealogies these latter lines branch, and hence wherein—we might suppose—all such Anglo-American lineages must otherwise resolve themselves?
Christopher Hanlon
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- May 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780199937585
- eISBN:
- 9780199333103
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199937585.003.0002
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 18th Century and Early American Literature, Criticism/Theory
This chapter traces the process through which northern and southern writers and public intellectuals conceived the struggle between the states as a conflict between two antagonistic racial groups ...
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This chapter traces the process through which northern and southern writers and public intellectuals conceived the struggle between the states as a conflict between two antagonistic racial groups steeped in the blood and ancestry of disparate biological origins. According to a logic emerging over the course of the 1850s and reaching a pitch during the opening years of the Civil War, Caucasian inhabitants of the southern and northern states were descended from the Norman Conquerors of 1066 and their vanquished Saxon subjects. Refracted through this racially polarizing lens, the struggle over slavery became the latest salvo in an “irrepressible conflict” whose roots lay in a centuries-old conflict. Placing Ralph Waldo Emerson’s English Traits (1856) in this context, I show that Emerson engaged such characterizations of English races even as he leveraged from them his vision of an ameliorative racial polity as the hallmark of England and of the United States.Less
This chapter traces the process through which northern and southern writers and public intellectuals conceived the struggle between the states as a conflict between two antagonistic racial groups steeped in the blood and ancestry of disparate biological origins. According to a logic emerging over the course of the 1850s and reaching a pitch during the opening years of the Civil War, Caucasian inhabitants of the southern and northern states were descended from the Norman Conquerors of 1066 and their vanquished Saxon subjects. Refracted through this racially polarizing lens, the struggle over slavery became the latest salvo in an “irrepressible conflict” whose roots lay in a centuries-old conflict. Placing Ralph Waldo Emerson’s English Traits (1856) in this context, I show that Emerson engaged such characterizations of English races even as he leveraged from them his vision of an ameliorative racial polity as the hallmark of England and of the United States.
Christopher Hanlon
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- May 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780199937585
- eISBN:
- 9780199333103
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199937585.003.0003
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 18th Century and Early American Literature, Criticism/Theory
This chapter examines another antebellum appropriation of ancient English history in the figure of the “Black Saxon.” Abolitionist intellectuals such as Frederick Douglass and Lydia Maria Child ...
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This chapter examines another antebellum appropriation of ancient English history in the figure of the “Black Saxon.” Abolitionist intellectuals such as Frederick Douglass and Lydia Maria Child developed a complex analogy through which African-American slaves became the contemporary rendition of the aggrieved Saxon serf, a figure who came to resonate within abolitionist discourses of 1840s and 50s. Henry Herbert’s historical novel Wager of Battle (1855) re-oriented the conventions of the slave narrative around such tropes in depicting liberty-loving Saxon serfs who liberate themselves from serfdom either through compensated manumission or flight. Such typologies, I argue, became interwoven with abolitionist legal and political critique of the fugitive slave law of 1850, dovetailing particularly with complaints—articulated in abolitionist discourse and in the U.S. Congress—of the law’s denial of habeas corpus and the right to trial by jury, what Wendell Phillips would call “the antient Saxon privilege” annulled by southern legislation.Less
This chapter examines another antebellum appropriation of ancient English history in the figure of the “Black Saxon.” Abolitionist intellectuals such as Frederick Douglass and Lydia Maria Child developed a complex analogy through which African-American slaves became the contemporary rendition of the aggrieved Saxon serf, a figure who came to resonate within abolitionist discourses of 1840s and 50s. Henry Herbert’s historical novel Wager of Battle (1855) re-oriented the conventions of the slave narrative around such tropes in depicting liberty-loving Saxon serfs who liberate themselves from serfdom either through compensated manumission or flight. Such typologies, I argue, became interwoven with abolitionist legal and political critique of the fugitive slave law of 1850, dovetailing particularly with complaints—articulated in abolitionist discourse and in the U.S. Congress—of the law’s denial of habeas corpus and the right to trial by jury, what Wendell Phillips would call “the antient Saxon privilege” annulled by southern legislation.
Juliet Shields
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- December 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780190272555
- eISBN:
- 9780190272579
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190272555.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 19th Century Literature, 19th-century Literature and Romanticism
This book provides a literary history for a nation that still considers itself a land of immigrants. Most studies of transatlantic literature focus primarily on what Stephen Spender has described as ...
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This book provides a literary history for a nation that still considers itself a land of immigrants. Most studies of transatlantic literature focus primarily on what Stephen Spender has described as the “love-hate relations” between the United States and England, the imperial center of the British Atlantic world. In contrast, this book explores the significant contributions of Scotland, Ireland, and Wales to the development of a British Atlantic literature and culture. It argues that, by allowing England to stand in for the British archipelago, recent literary scholarship has oversimplified the processes through which the new United States differentiated itself culturally from Britain and underestimated the impact of migration on British nation formation during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Scottish, Irish, and Welsh migrants brought with them to the American colonies and early republic stories and traditions very different from those shared by English settlers. Americans looked to these stories for narratives of cultural and racial origins through which to legitimate their new nation. Writers situated in Britain’s Celtic peripheries in turn drew on American discourses of rights and liberties to assert the cultural independence of Scotland, Ireland, and Wales from the English imperial center. The stories that late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britons and Americans told about transatlantic migration and settlement, whether from the position of migrant or observer, reveal the tenuousness and fragility of Britain and the United States as relatively new national entities. These stories illustrate the dialectical relationship between nation and migration.Less
This book provides a literary history for a nation that still considers itself a land of immigrants. Most studies of transatlantic literature focus primarily on what Stephen Spender has described as the “love-hate relations” between the United States and England, the imperial center of the British Atlantic world. In contrast, this book explores the significant contributions of Scotland, Ireland, and Wales to the development of a British Atlantic literature and culture. It argues that, by allowing England to stand in for the British archipelago, recent literary scholarship has oversimplified the processes through which the new United States differentiated itself culturally from Britain and underestimated the impact of migration on British nation formation during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Scottish, Irish, and Welsh migrants brought with them to the American colonies and early republic stories and traditions very different from those shared by English settlers. Americans looked to these stories for narratives of cultural and racial origins through which to legitimate their new nation. Writers situated in Britain’s Celtic peripheries in turn drew on American discourses of rights and liberties to assert the cultural independence of Scotland, Ireland, and Wales from the English imperial center. The stories that late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britons and Americans told about transatlantic migration and settlement, whether from the position of migrant or observer, reveal the tenuousness and fragility of Britain and the United States as relatively new national entities. These stories illustrate the dialectical relationship between nation and migration.
