Transatlantic Literature and Transitivity 1780-1850

<p>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. </p>