Carlyle, Emerson and the Transatlantic Uses of Authority

Tim Sommer is a Lecturer and Postdoctoral Researcher at the English Department of the University of Heidelberg. He has held visiting appointments at Harvard University and at the University of Cambridge. His research has appeared or is forthcoming in journals such as Romanticism, Book History, The New England Quarterly and The Wordsworth Circle.

Emerson and Carlyle were an odd couple and a transatlantic cultural powerhouse. Their decades-long exchange electrified literary circuits and jolted thinking about historiography, race, nationhood, copyright and lecturing, as Tim Sommer shows. This shrewd study of the nineteenth century’s alternating currents of cultural authority snaps and crackles with insights.

• AcknowledgementsAbbreviationsIntroduction: Transatlantic Literary Culture and the Uses of Authority Part I: Anglo-American Literary and Cultural Identities1. Race and Nationhood in the Mid-Nineteenth-Century Transatlantic Field2. Usable Pasts: Anglo-American Literature and the Authority of Tradition Part II: Authority and Authorisation in the Anglo-American Print Market3. ‘Transatlantic Bibliopoly’: Carlyle’s Early American Print Career4. ‘A Yankee Pocket Edition of Carlyle’? Emerson on the British MarketPart III: Performing Nationhood on the Transatlantic Lecture Circuit5. Touring Anglo-America: Emerson as Transatlantic Lecturer6. (De-)Authorising Eloquence: Carlyle and Transatlantic Public SpeechEpilogue: From Sectional Conflict to Posthumous ConsecrationBibliographyIndex