Edinburgh Critical Studies in Atlantic Literatures and Cultures – Serie

Re-reads Emily Dickinson's works in terms of a nineteenth-century transatlantic culture and British poetic tradition.

Examines a range of literary responses to images drawn from the transatlantic slave trade and its aftermathA focus on texts that (with the obvious exception of David Dabydeen's 'Turner' [1994]) exist at the critical and canonical marginAn emphasis on Black Atlantic writers, designed to counter the bias in much ekphrastic criticism towards white authorsLocation of African American literature in conversation with African American as well as white American artSince around 2000, there has been a noticeable upsurge in critical work on the visual archive of Atlantic slavery, resulting in a host of important studies. While most of these contributions are weighted towards images created during the era of slavery itself, some critics have adopted a more historically far-reaching approach, exploring the ways in which such images live on beyond the original context of their production, circulation and consumption, returning imaginatively in different forms at different times and in different places. This book shares the fascination with the afterlives which such visual materials have enjoyed, but places the accent on how that posterity has evolved in the realms of literature, especially poetry. It focuses on transactions between texts written between the mid-1990s and 2020 and images of slavery that belong to British, American and (in one case) French traditions, as produced between c. 1779 and 1939.

Since around 2000, there has been a noticeable upsurge in critical work on the visual archive of Atlantic slavery, resulting in a host of important studies. While most of these contributions are weighted towards images created during the era of slavery itself, some critics have adopted a more historically far-reaching approach, exploring the ways in which such images live on beyond the original context of their production, circulation and consumption, returning imaginatively in different forms at different times and in different places. This book shares the fascination with the afterlives which such visual materials have enjoyed, but places the accent on how that posterity has evolved in the realms of literature, especially poetry. It focuses on transactions between texts written between the mid-1990s and 2020 and images of slavery that belong to British, American and (in one case) French traditions, as produced between c. 1779 and 1939.

Traces authors' attitudes toward US economic expansionism through their fictional allusions to internationally-traded commoditiesPairs global economic histories with close readings of commodities depicted in fiction in order to shed new light on the strategies that both well-known and under-studied authors use to critique US economic expansionism at the turn of the twentieth centuryEmploys an interdisciplinary methodology informed by literary studies, global history, art history, economic history, postcolonial studies, and gender studiesIdentifies affinities across literary chronologies, geographies, genres and fields through authors' common engagement with long international histories of commodity chainsReframes literary debates about domesticity in a global context in order to reveal complex, varied and at times contradictory attitudes toward the intersection of gender and U.S. imperialismExamines a variety of primary source materials, including novels, short stories, poetry, paintings, home decorating guides, women's magazines, children's geography books, trade reports, newspaper articles and journalsWhat is a reference to an Italian Egyptologist doing in Louisa May Alcott's portrait of domesticity Little Women? Why does Elizabeth Stuart Phelps's painter protagonist Avis Dobell know--and care--that her red shawl is dyed with desiccated beetles? Why might W.E.B. Du Bois's fictional sharecropper display a reproduction of a painting by William-Adolphe Bouguereau near his cotton field? These questions, and more, are answered by Consuming Empire in US Fiction, 1865-1930. An interdisciplinary study of references to internationally-traded commodities in US fiction, Consuming Empire in US Fiction, 1865-1930 assembles an integrated geopolitical analysis of Americans' material, gendered, and aesthetic experiences of empire at the turn of the twentieth century. Examining allusions to contested goods like cochineal, cotton, oranges, fur, gold, pearls, porcelain, and wheat, Consuming Empire in US Fiction, 1865-1930 reveals a linked global imagination among authors who were often directly or indirectly critical of US imperial ambitions. Furthermore, Consuming Empire in US Fiction, 1865-1930 considers the commodification of art itself, interpreting writers' allusions to paintings, sculptures, and artists as self-aware acknowledgments of their own complicity in global capitalism. As Consuming Empire in US Fiction, 1865-1930 demonstrates, literary texts have long trained consumers to imagine their relationship to the world through the things they own.

What is a reference to an Italian Egyptologist doing in Louisa May Alcott's portrait of domesticity Little Women? Why does Elizabeth Stuart Phelps's painter protagonist Avis Dobell know--and care--that her red shawl is dyed with desiccated beetles? Why might W.E.B. Du Bois's fictional sharecropper display a reproduction of a painting by William-Adolphe Bouguereau near his cotton field? These questions, and more, are answered by Consuming Empire in US Fiction, 1865 1930. An interdisciplinary study of references to internationally-traded commodities in US fiction, Consuming Empire in US Fiction, 1865 1930 assembles an integrated geopolitical analysis of Americans' material, gendered, and aesthetic experiences of empire at the turn of the twentieth century. Examining allusions to contested goods like cochineal, cotton, oranges, fur, gold, pearls, porcelain, and wheat, Consuming Empire in US Fiction, 1865 1930 reveals a linked global imagination among authors who were often directly or indirectly critical of US imperial ambitions. Furthermore, Consuming Empire in US Fiction, 1865 1930 considers the commodification of art itself, interpreting writers' allusions to paintings, sculptures, and artists as self-aware acknowledgments of their own complicity in global capitalism. As Consuming Empire in US Fiction, 1865 1930 demonstrates, literary texts have long trained consumers to imagine their relationship to the world through the things they own.

First book devoted to Derek Walcott's lifelong engagement with the Atlantic visual artsBringing together local, Atlantic and global dimensions and putting in dialogue and contextualising Walcott's work with the works of specific artists, it retraces Walcott's unique, empowering, but utterly neglected 'art history' Brings to the fore the importance and reverberations of interdisciplinary dialogues in the Atlantic world and in decolonising discourses and processesSheds new light on the ways in which Walcott conjugated his engagement with the European, North/South American and African American traditions, envisaged their relationship with Caribbean culture and redefined the role he believed the latter should and could play on an Atlantic and global scaleIs mindful of Walcott's attention to painting techniques but, most importantly, foregrounds his keen interest in the multiple narratives" that the visual works he was confronting not only explicitly revealed but also implicitly suggestedHighlights the attention Walcott paid to the circumstances and 'locations' of his encounters with the works in question (i.e. local settings, metropolitan museums and artbooks).Walcott's lifelong concern with painting and painters deeply inflected his aesthetics and politics. Walcott's interventions on the relationship between Caribbean and colonial history have been thoroughly scrutinised, but, arguably, Walcott was also keen to address and (re)write an art history of which, paraphrasing a line from Omeros, the Caribbean too was/is capable. Contextualising and putting in conversation Walcott's published and unpublished writings (poems, plays, essays, journalism) and his drawings or paintings (privately owned and publicly disseminated) with specific artists from the Caribbean, Europe, South and North America, Derek Walcott's Painters recalibrates and sharpens our understanding of Walcott's articulation of his own politics and poetics and of the Caribbean's contributions to Atlantic and global culture. "

Walcott's lifelong concern with painting and painters deeply inflected his aesthetics and politics. Walcott's interventions on the relationship between Caribbean and colonial history have been thoroughly scrutinised, but, arguably, Walcott was also keen to address and (re)write an art history "of which," paraphrasing a line from Omeros, the Caribbean "too" was/is "capable". Contextualising and putting in conversation Walcott's published and unpublished writings (poems, plays, essays, journalism) and his drawings or paintings (privately owned and publicly disseminated) with specific artists from the Caribbean, Europe, South and North America, Derek Walcott's Painters recalibrates and sharpens our understanding of Walcott's articulation of his own politics and poetics and of the Caribbean's contributions to Atlantic and global culture.

At this critical juncture in which the biodiversity of planet Earth appears to be shrinking fast and furiously, Louis Kirk McAuley invites us to consider the ways in which particular unruly natures, including animals, plants and minerals, actively intervene in literature to decentre the human. Drawing upon invasion biology, McAuley offers transformative ecocritical interpretations of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British and American literature and highlights the heterarchical nature of empire building. This includes analyses of texts composed by (or about) persons residing at, or just outside, the edges of the British and American Empires, including St Kitts and Nevis, Haiti, Cuba, Hawaii and Samoa, which were built around the global transfer of animals and plants. Offering biotic readings of this literature, McAuley highlights the human place in nature and provides practical literary examples of the ways oceans facilitate the confusion of time and place.

At this critical juncture in which the biodiversity of planet Earth appears to be shrinking fast and furiously, Louis Kirk McAuley invites us to consider the ways in which particular unruly natures, including animals, plants and minerals, actively intervene in literature to decentre the human. Drawing upon invasion biology, McAuley offers transformative ecocritical interpretations of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British and American literature and highlights the heterarchical nature of empire building. This includes analyses of texts composed by (or about) persons residing at, or just outside, the edges of the British and American Empires, including St Kitts and Nevis, Haiti, Cuba, Hawaii and Samoa, which were built around the global transfer of animals and plants. Offering biotic readings of this literature, McAuley highlights the human place in nature and provides practical literary examples of the ways oceans facilitate the confusion of time and place.

Remaps the borders of transatlantic feeling and resituates the role of international memory in U.S. culture in the long nineteenth century and beyondIn refocusing attention on the Paris Commune as a key event in American political and cultural memory, Sensational Internationalism radically changes our understanding of the relationship between France and the United States in the long nineteenth century. It offers fascinating, remarkably accessible readings of a range of literary works, from periodical poetry and boys’ adventure fiction to radical pulp and the writings of Henry James, as well as a rich analysis of visual, print, and performance culture, from post-bellum illustrated weeklies and panoramas to agit-prop pamphlets and Coney Island pyrotechnic shows. This book will speak to readers looking to understand the affective, cultural, and aesthetic afterlives of revolt and revolution pre-and-post Occupy Wall Street, as well as those interested in space, gender, performance, and transatlantic print culture.Key FeaturesMulti-disciplinary study of the cultural legacy of the Paris Commune in both mainstream and leftist U.S. memoryContributes to recent work on the global dimensions of pre-Popular front radical culture in the USAddresses a critical ongoing blind spot in American Studies by extending the borders of transatlantic affiliation beyond the confines of Anglo-American attachmentsOffers innovative readings of well-known and altogether neglected cultural texts

WINNER of the 2017 Arthur Miller Institute First Book Prize. Remaps the borders of transatlantic feeling and resituates the role of international memory in U.S. culture in the long nineteenth century and beyond.In refocusing attention on the Paris Commune as a key event in American political and cultural memory, 'Sensational Internationalism' radically changes our understanding of the relationship between France and the United States in the long nineteenth century. It offers fascinating, remarkably accessible readings of a range of literary works, from periodical poetry and boys' adventure fiction to radical pulp and the writings of Henry James, as well as a rich analysis of visual, print, and performance culture, from post-bellum illustrated weeklies and panoramas to agit-prop pamphlets and Coney Island pyrotechnic shows. Throughout, it uncovers how a foreign revolution came back to life as a domestic commodity, and why for decades another nation's memory came to feel so much our own. This book will speak to readers looking to understand the affective, cultural, and aesthetic afterlives of revolt and revolution pre-and-post Occupy Wall Street, as well as those interested in space, gender, performance, and transatlantic print culture.

Examines tourists' aesthetic responses in the context of US nation formation'American Travel Literature' analyses US tourist writings about Italy from 1824 to 1862 to explain what roles transatlantic travel, aesthetic response, and the genre of tourist writing played in the formation of the United States. Its interdisciplinary methodology draws on antebellum visual culture, tourist practices, and shifting class and gender identities to describe tourism and tourist writing as shapers of an elite (and then normative) national subjectivity.Bringing perspectives from art history and aesthetics, the book historicises aesthetic practices by tracing nineteenth-century US representations of Italy. It draws connections between tourist writing and visual culture as means of understanding the depth of Americans' turn towards visual iconography in articulating social and national identities.Key FeaturesThe interdisciplinary approach pushes analysis of growing area of travel writing furtherThe trope of Italy as a woman reveals how gendered patterns of thought and response processed concepts of national identity thus recognising gender as a crucial mode of perceptionHistoricizes aesthetic practices by looking closely at a particular genre (tourist writing) and its social functions in the antebellum period

Examines tourists’ aesthetic responses in the context of US nation formationAmerican Travel Literature analyses tourist writings about Italy from 1824 to 1862 to explain what roles transatlantic travel, aesthetic response and the genre of tourist writing played in the formation of the United States. The Italian tour and its textual and visual expressions were forms through which predominantly white, northeastern elites dreamed their way into national identity and cultural authority. Its interdisciplinary methodology draws on antebellum visual culture, tourist practices and shifting class and gender identities to describe tourism and tourist writing as shapers of an elite (and then normative) national subjectivity. Bringing perspectives from art history and aesthetics, it historicises aesthetic practices, illuminating the depth of Americans’ turn towards visual iconography in articulating social and national identities. The book investigates tourists’ triangulations of the categories of ‘England’, ‘Italy’ and ‘America’, discusses authors understood as national representatives − Irving, Cooper, Sedgwick, Kirkland, Fuller, Hawthorne and Stowe − in the context of other US and European writers and artists and looks at transatlantic tourist writing as a significant genre of the period that shaped the nation. Key FeaturesThe interdisciplinary approach pushes analysis of growing area of travel writing furtherThe trope of Italy as a woman reveals how gendered patterns of thought and response processed concepts of national identity thus recognising gender as a crucial mode of perceptionHistoricizes aesthetic practices by looking closely at a particular genre (tourist writing) and its social functions in the antebellum period

This book focuses on three undertakings at Nova Scotia (1620s), East New Jersey (1680s) and the Isthmus of Panama, then known as Darien (1690s). Analysing works written in the larger context of the Scottish Atlantic, it examines how the Atlantic influenced seventeenth-century Scottish literature and vice versa. The relationship between art and ideology is key to the author’s discussion as Sandrock argues early modern writing employed utopianism as a tool for empire-building and as a means of claiming power over the Atlantic.

Brings together previously dispersed sources to argue for a tradition of Scottish colonial writing before the Union of ParliamentsOffers the first comprehensive study of Scottish colonial literature before 1707Focus on Scotland contributes to the diversification of studies on the early British Empire Provides a fresh argument about Atlantic writing contributing to the transformation of utopian literature from a fictional to a reformist genreEnters debates about Scotland's position in colonial and postcolonial studies through its focus on pre-1707 Atlantic literature This book focuses on three undertakings at Nova Scotia (1620s), East New Jersey (1680s) and the Isthmus of Panama, then known as Darien (1690s). Analysing works written in the larger context of the Scottish Atlantic, it examines how the Atlantic influenced seventeenth-century Scottish literature and vice versa. The relationship between art and ideology is key to the author's discussion as Sandrock argues early modern writing employed utopianism as a tool for empire-building and as a means of claiming power over the Atlantic.

Reassesses American elitisms of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century  Arguing that Henry Adams, Henry James and Edith Wharton articulated their political thought in response to the liberalism that reigned in Boston and, more specifically, at Harvard University, this book shows how each of these authors interrogated that liberalism's arguments for education, democracy and the political duties of the cultivated elite. Coit shows that the works of these authors contributed to a realist critique of a liberal New England idealism that fed into the narrative about 'the genteel tradition', which shaped the study of US literature during the twentieth century.

Reassesses American elitisms of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century Brings together the insights of recent Victorianist and Americanist scholarship in order to show how Adams, James, and Wharton engage with liberal thinking about whiteness, democracy, and citizenship.Locates these authors in disciplinary history, revealing that their critical responses to Bostonian liberalism feed into the ideas that structure the study of US literary history during the twentieth century.Offers a rich portrait of the Harvard intellectual milieu to which these authors respond, bringing fresh attention to their connections with thinkers such as W.E.B. Du Bois, Charles William Eliot, Charles Eliot Norton, and Barrett Wendell. Arguing that Henry Adams, Henry James and Edith Wharton articulated their political thought in response to the liberalism that reigned in Boston and, more specifically, at Harvard University, this book shows how each of these authors interrogated that liberalism's arguments for education, democracy and the political duties of the cultivated elite. Coit shows that the works of these authors contributed to a realist critique of a liberal New England idealism that fed into the narrative about 'the genteel tradition', which shaped the study of US literature during the twentieth century.

In this book, Stefanie Schäfer provides the first study of the Yankee’s many facets. Reading together Yankee Doodle, Brother Jonathan, Uncle Sam, the Yankee Peddler and the Down Easter, she highlights the Yankee’s ambiguity: His performance hinges on storytelling and fraudulence. An invention of transatlantic origin, the Yankee straddles regional and sectional, rural and urban, working class and bourgeois US identities. For nineteenth-century audiences at home and abroad, he becomes the hegemonic embodiment of US national character, its political and material culture and the homespun agent of its imperial fantasies.

A systematic study of the most iconic national character in the US in nineteenth-century literature and cultureYankee Yarns provides the first systematic study of the Yankee's formation in 19th century US cultureCritiques US national historiographies by revealing an indulgence in storytelling, fraudulence, and self-irony at the heart of the US national characterArgues that US national culture is originally transnational and transatlanticIn this book, Stefanie Sch fer provides the first study of the Yankee's many facets. Reading together Yankee Doodle, Brother Jonathan, Uncle Sam, the Yankee Peddler and the Down Easter, she highlights the Yankee's ambiguity: His performance hinges on storytelling and fraudulence. An invention of transatlantic origin, the Yankee straddles regional and sectional, rural and urban, working class and bourgeois US identities. For nineteenth-century audiences at home and abroad, he becomes the hegemonic embodiment of US national character, its political and material culture and the homespun agent of its imperial fantasies.

A broad, comparative and trans-Atlantic approach to the Age of RevolutionsCutting across disciplines and linguistic borders, this book explores the dissemination and transformation of revolutionary ideas in the period between the mid-eighteenth century and the revolutions of 1848. In addition to revolutionary movements in Europe and the United States, it deals with the international impact of the Haitian Revolution. The chapters in the book adopt transnational approaches to revolution to show how political uprisings often reverberated far beyond the borders of the states directly affected – in the form of narratives, metaphors, translations, letters, pamphlets and dialogues, as well as physical objects.