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This rediscovery of the bold cosmopolitan activism and professional literary adventures of six American writers argues that antebellum authors never imagined ‘America’ without thinking of other nations and never defined it outside the context of a network of global relationships. As this book challenges theories of national exceptionalism, it also questions the exceptional status of literature itself. By looking beyond authors’ familiar literary works, this study illuminates their practices of Atlantic citizenship. From leading authors Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Ralph Waldo Emerson to popular writer Grace Greenwood, the figures who animate this book shape their careers in the fields of education, journalism, public lecturing, and editing in productive relation to their development as imaginative writers. To see Frederick Douglass as a fiery newspaper editor as well as an autobiographer, to witness Margaret Fuller reporting from the front lines of battle in revolutionary Rome as well as writing her country’s first feminist treatise, and to witness Walt Whitman co-producing foreign editions of his work with British poets as well as exuberantly breaking free from verse strictures on the page is to comprehend more fully the ways in which these writers acted in the transatlantic sphere. By doing so, they are able to achieve critical distance from the United States and, paradoxically, to catalyse its ongoing growth.

Reading the early American canon through its Middle Eastern translations, Nineteenth-Century US Literature in Middle Eastern Languages examines prominent renditions of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville and Walt Whitman into Hebrew, Persian and Arabic. Tracing the revisionary processes which give rise to these Middle Eastern versions, the book argues that such translations offer unique and pivotal interpretations of their US sources, refiguring the American Renaissance through alterities of language, nationality and religion. The book suggests, in particular, that the importation of the US canon into arenas of Middle Eastern language serves to uncover implications latent within these American classics themselves, disclosing their compound cultural genealogies, while also promoting their complex participation within global cycles of textual transmission. Recovering Hebrew, Arabic and Persian renditions produced by seminal Middle Eastern artists and academics, the book also exposes illuminating readings of US literature previously neglected, accounting for the interpretations of prominent translators, novelists and scholars, such as Joseph Massel, Sīmīn Dāneshvar and Iḥsān ‘Abbās.

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.

This book explores Tennyson’s poetic relationship with Wordsworth through a close analysis of Tennyson’s borrowing of the earlier poet’s words and phrases, an approach that positions Wordsworth in Tennyson’s poetry in a more centralised way than previously recognised. Focusing on some of the most emblematic poems of Tennyson’s career, including ‘The Lady of Shalott’, ‘Ulysses’, and In Memoriam, the study examines the echoes from Wordsworth that these poems contain and the transformative part they play in his poetry, moving beyond existing accounts of Wordsworthian influence in the selected texts to uncover new and revealing connections and interactions that shed a penetrating light on Tennyson’s poetic relationship with his Romantic predecessor.

Transatlantic Transcendentalism: Coleridge, Emerson, and Nature is the first book devoted to the most important transatlantic source for Emerson and the development of American Transcendentalism: the work of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Coleridge's thought galvanized Emerson at a pivotal moment in his intellectual development in the years 1826–1836. Coleridge's discriminating distinctions and definitions, his call for cultivating the art of reflection, and his dynamic intellectual method gave Emerson new ways to think about a central question of Romanticism: what is the relationship between the natural, spiritual, and human worlds? Emerson did not think about Coleridge: he thought with Coleridge, resulting in a unique case of assimilative influence.The emerging field of transatlantic studies has opened new circulatory spaces to reconsider the relationship between Coleridge and Emerson by restoring the intellectual contexts and the rich interplay of ideas across the Atlantic. While Coleridge's thought guided, stimulated, and provoked Emerson to create his most distinctive literary creations, it also shaped several major American intellectual movements. In addition toexamining Coleridge's specific literary, philosophical, and theological influences on Emerson, this bookreveals his centrality for Boston Transcendentalism and the related but lesser-known Vermont Transcendentalism, a movement which profoundly affected the development of modern higher education, the national press, and the emergence of Pragmatism. Transatlantic Transcendentalism dedicates one chapter to each category of the Romantic triad of nature, humanity, and spirit, bookended by two historical chapters about Coleridge's American legacy for Boston and Vermont Transcendentalism. Chapter 4 is dedicated to Coleridge's intellectual method and his practice of “distinguishing without dividing” as dynamic strategies for mediating the Romantic triad.