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 popu ... More

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.