I want to take Twain’s comment as an opportunity to interrogate the different approaches we might take in engaging critically
with transatlantic Romanticism. Parsing the claims and assumptions of Twain’s argument, we arrive at the following questions
about transatlantic Romanticism: (1) What is the impact of English authors and texts in America, and vice versa? (2) Does
Romanticism foster a shared transatlantic culture, or generate national and regional specificity?
These questions become further complicated by the fact that Twain is discussing the Civil War and gender
ing “Southern character,” for “it was Sir Walter that made every gentleman in the South a major or a colonel, or a general
or a judge.”
2 This masculine gendering relied on specific “structures of feeling,” to borrow Raymond Williams’s phrase, that made “flowery
‘eloquence’” key to nineteenth-century literature. Twain’s assessment thus occasions three additional questions: (3) What
are the gender politics of transatlantic Romanticism? (4) What is the importance of slavery
and race
, which Twain elides in his discussion of the Civil War, for our understanding of transatlantic Romanticism? (5) How does
this expand our understanding of transatlantic Romanticism beyond Anglo-American Romanticism?
The term “Romanticism” has two meanings. First, it is “a term applied to certain movements in literature, philosophy, and
the arts that developed in different countries between the 1780s and the 1830s.”
3 By this definition, Romanticism marks a specific historical time period but not a specific geographical location in that
it stretches beyond individual countries and cultures. That geographical reach has become central to definitions of Romanticism
as a “tremendously diverse, multilingual phenomenon” that “spanned the entire Atlantic Rim from the Scottish Hebrides to Africa’s
Cape of Good Hope and from Canada’s Newfoundland to Tierra del Fuego at the tip of South America,” and that was marked by
“sharp hierarchies of political, economic and cultural power.”
4 Second, Romanticism refers “to the characteristics associated with these movements: an intense inwardness that led at times
to melancholy; a preference for lyrical or descriptive genres; a sympathy for human passion in all its forms; a willingness
to question existing institutions, especially if they threaten the primacy of the self; a willingness to countenance resistance
or revolution
as a way of achieving a just society; and a vision of nature as a place not only of beauty but also of innocence and authenticity.”
5 The development of Romanticism as an area of study in the twentieth-century academy initially privileged the second definition
in that it focused on the characteristics of the movement in isolation from its historical, cross-cultural conditions, and
defined Romanticism as an aesthetic movement. But now, history
replaces the aestheticism of the New Critics. The historical, political, and ideological concerns of British canonical poets
like Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley, and Keats are now read as constitutive of their poetry rather than as “‘background’ material,”
6 while the relationship between literature and politics has called into question the primacy of canonical texts, allowing
other writings to become objects of analysis both as “background” and as matter in their own right.
Romanticism was long an uneven term in transatlantic contexts. When literary studies separated British from American national
literatures and read each in relationship to nationalism
, Romanticism was a British and European movement which was represented in America only through
imported books prior to the development of “American Renaissance” literature. This term, coined by F. O. Matthiessen in 1941,
was used to argue that a uniquely American Romantic literature developed only in the 1850s, in the writings of transcendentalist
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Henry David Thoreau, and Walt Whitman.
7 Dismissing earlier American Romantic writers such as Washington Irving and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow – who were widely popular
in nineteenth-century America but who were now devalued for “failing” to establish a distinctly American national literature
– enabled Americanists to represent British Romanticism
, at best as a precursor to the “American Renaissance,” at worst as a hindrance to the development of a uniquely American
literature. Strangely, then, American Romanticism was transatlantic, even in its devaluation. “Widespread agreement that the
romantic period exists as a meaningful span of time”
8 reinforced the exclusion of American literature from Romanticism proper, since the latter’s usual cut-off date around 1820
created a gap between the end of British Romanticism and the beginning of American Romanticism/transcendentalism.
This periodization has now been eroded by new attention to Britain’s Atlantic empire and by transatlantic studies such as
Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse’s work on reciprocal British and American literary relations.
9 In this view, the transatlantic is a space not of one-way linear textual transmission but of circular and refracted literary
relationships, and Romanticism is from its inception deeply transatlantic. Recent accounts of transatlanticism reject models
of linear historical time: Wai-Chee Dimock, for instance, argues that literature inhabits a deep time that links seemingly
disparate chronologies through textual circulation and the diverse temporalities of reading.
10 Though the danger here may be a return to aestheticism, as Dimock recognizes,
11 this allows us to extend Romanticism’s concerns and relevance beyond its traditional periodization, 1780– 1820.
When scholarly interest shifted from national literatures to inter- and transnational literary relations, literary studies
took a “transnational turn”
12 and the “transatlantic” emerged as a way of inquiring anew into Anglo-American literary relations. Those relations had not
previously been neglected – “We have in abundance theoretical considerations of Anglo-American difference,” as Weisbuch points
out
13 – but transatlantic literary studies, as it emerged in conjunction with novel approaches to Romanticism, moved beyond existing
models of comparative inquiry, while abolishing the foundational investment of American literary studies in white male exceptionalism.
By emphasizing race and gender
, a generation of Americanists began to make multicultural difference the field’s guiding paradigm. But their work itself
came under scrutiny, primarily from European
scholars such as Paul Giles, for focusing on America’s internal multiculturalism without recognizing America’s relationship
to external cultures, and for not reading literature beyond the geopolitical confines of the nation
state.
14
The historical meaning of the term ‘transatlantic’ lays the groundwork for such an approach. As David Armitage observes, “the
earliest usages of ‘trans-Atlantic’ can be found in England during the war in 1779–81.”
15 The term came into use during the American
Revolution, and is explained as follows in Noah Webster’s dictionary (1828):
lying or being beyond the Atlantic. When used by a person in Europe or Africa, transatlantic signifies being in America; when
by a person in America, it denotes being or lying in Europe or Africa. We apply it chiefly to something in Europe.
16
The “transatlantic” envisions a relationship to an always distant yet ever proximate other. “Transatlantic” defines a location
that is always elsewhere: it means “being in America” only when one is not in America; when one is in America, it means being
in Europe or Africa. The term operates in relation to, yet independently of, any definitive locus. Only secondarily a geographical
marker, it is therefore first and foremost a term that defines relationship. Arjun Appadurai has made a useful and cognate
distinction in another context:
as scholars concerned with localities, circulation, and comparison, we need to make a decisive shift away from what we may
call “trait” geographies to what we could call “process” geographies. Much traditional thinking about “areas” has been driven
by conceptions of geographical, civilizational, and cultural coherence that rely on some sort of list – of values, languages,
material practices, ecological adaptations, marriage patterns, and the like. However sophisticated these approaches, they
all tend to see “areas” as relatively immobile aggregates of traits, with more or less durable historical boundaries and with
a unity composed of more or less enduring properties.
17
In other words, instead of drawing on the transatlantic as a geographical term and defining Romanticism as an “aggregate”
of fixed and culturally coherent “traits,” we need to think of transatlantic Romanticism as a complicated process that stretches
across diverse geographies and temporalities. Drawing on Saskia Sassen’s claim about spatiality and temporality, I want to
propose that we think of transatlantic Romanticism as belonging “to both the global and the national, if only in part. This
‘in part’ is an especially important qualification, as in my reading the global is itself
partial, albeit strategic…the dynamics of interaction…operate both within the global and the national and between them.”
18 Sassen agrees here with Stuart Hall’s influential argument, that the formation of modernity was not just “internalist”; it
had crucial “externalist” features – aspects which could not be explained without “taking into account the rest of the world,
where these processes were not at work and where these kinds of society did not emerge.”
19 Conceptually, though “transatlantic” provides a way of thinking space relationally, it has historically framed relationships
unevenly: in Webster’s definition, “transatlantic” privileges European–American connections over African–American and African–European
contexts. Modern studies of Romanticism
address this unevenness by showing how European–American connections are haunted by slavery
’s violent displacements, literally through the Middle Passage, and metaphorically through the creation of an extra-territorial
literature.
Since Paul Gilroy’s landmark publication
The Black Atlantic (1993) helped inaugurate the field, transatlantic studies has grappled with unevenness by blurring the boundaries between
what counts as internal and external to (a) culture. Gilroy argued that the slave trade gave rise to cultural modernity, and
conceived of the Atlantic as a space where different cultures came into being through relationships with each other. Rejecting
cultural essentialism, Gilroy insisted that no single culture of origin holds explanatory power for the cultures that emerged
as a result of uneven relationships, for instance aboard slave ships. Gilroy was particularly attentive to the way in which
the transatlantic voyage fractured time and space, and enabled the emergence of a “counter-modernity” that did not participate
in a single geographical or temporal telos but reflected the complex mappings of cultural diaspora (a term borrowed with due
caution from Jewish Studies).
20 Black Atlantic studies have been criticized for replicating the imbalances they wished to address – Charles Piot points out,
for instance, that Gilroy has nothing to say about Africa itself, which was itself deeply affected by the Atlantic slave trade
and by modernity;
21 and Herman Bennett argues that the concept of diaspora depends on the concept of nation, and cannot therefore represent an
alternative to it in explaining historical developments.
22In recent years, sustained critical attention has been paid to reading Romanticism in the context of the slave trade. Asking
“what led Britons, between 1768 and 1833, after two hundred years of exploring distant lands and enslaving their peoples,
to campaign against slavery in the empire and exploitation at home,” Timothy Fulford et al. argue that transatlantic literature
was a driving force in the movement towards abolition: “Religious and economic arguments played vital parts; another factor,
however, was
the way literary writers awakened an expanding reading public to what explorers and natural philosophers told them about the
inhabitants of faraway places.”
23 These texts made it possible to “imagine a relationship with people one would never meet,” which impacted not only readers
who entered into sympathetic engagement with others, but also authors such as William Cowper who consequently “changed his
practice as a writer”:
Throughout his work he credited travel writing with enabling him to imagine disinterested, though vicarious, relationships
with people unlike himself. He described these relationships at length so that his readers could share them, and then he explicitly
contrasted them to the exploitative treatment that British traders and colonisers meted out to the people of established colonies.
Cowper, in other words, not only branded colonial exploration and enslavement as the products of a national self-interestedness
but imagined a disinterested alternative. He offered the ethical relationship exemplified in his own poetry as a counter example
to the immoral relationships that prevailed in the existing empire. Cowper’s was a seminal achievement. The poets who succeeded
him were to intensify his process of imagining disinterested relationships with the foreign.
24
Cowper was not alone among Romantic authors in making the transatlantic central to his artistic enterprise. Marcus Wood examines
the impact slavery had on the thinking and literary composition of virtually all the canonical British Romantic poets. He
rereads Blake’s engagement with questions of social injustice and physical violence, for instance, by showing how Blake grappled
with slavery’s psychologically damaging impact on black and white populations transatlantically. His work’s impact depended
on transatlantic circulation: Blake’s prophetic books, which remained almost unknown in Britain, were printed in North America
in 1842, and there became a significant part of the anti-slavery debates.
25Recent scholars have been cautious not to replicate the marginalization of Africa
resonant in Webster’s and Gilroy’s definition of the transatlantic. Helen Thomas, for instance, recovers “a hitherto obscured
dialogue of exchange and negotiation”: that is, between the discourse of Romanticism as it emerged out of eighteenth-century
dissent and enthusiasm, and the narratives of displaced subjects, the slaves from the African diaspora. By shifting her emphasis
in this way, she hopes to pose “a significant challenge to concepts of romanticism which continue to hold the revolutions
in France and America at their centre,” and “endeavours instead to prioritise the slaves’ rebellions, both literary and actual,
upon the emerging autobiographical genre.”
26 The study of transatlantic Romanticism has also become an important place to trace in late eighteenth-century writings “a
foundational moment in black Atlantic intellectual history, a moment that generated two essential modes of black thought about
Africa.
The first imagined Africa
as a place to be redeemed through emigration, colonization, and proselytization by once-enslaved Christian blacks, and the
second conceived of Africa as a recollected group consciousness among the members of the modern black diaspora.”
27 The transatlantic provided a space where racial formations could occur that offered an alternative to pro-slavery brands
of nationalism
. Having argued that mercantilism “transformed the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century North Atlantic by simultaneously
consolidating national economies, entrenching the codification of racial and national identity among North Atlantic subjects,”
David Kazanjian shows how the transatlantic appealed to a number of black and white writers critical of slavery because it
functioned in their cultural imagination as a utopic space beyond racial difference.
28This attention to the black Atlantic grew from and contributed to a larger scholarly reevaluation of the impact that the complex
racial politics of colonial geographies had on the transatlantic imaginary, with Romanticism
acquiring key importance as the nexus between different phases of British empire-building. Reassessments of transatlantic
Romanticism’s racial formations produced important rereadings of canonical authors, and reshaped our understanding of Romanticism
as a globalist (and often imperialist) project.
29The new attention to cultural formations that emerge in the transatlantic context has, for instance, enabled a reassessment
of the role that real and imaginary Native Americans played in the formation of transatlantic culture. This has led Kate Flint
to document the complex cultural construction of what she calls “the transatlantic Indian”
30 and Tim Fulford to coin the terms “Indian Atlantic”
31 and “Romantic Indian.”
32 Arguing that an engagement with Native Americans prompted Sir Walter Scott to write
The Lady of the Lake, Fulford argues that “it is not too much to say that Romanticism would not have taken the form it did without the complex
and ambiguous image of Indians that so intrigued both the writers and their readers” and details the “Indians’ formative role
in the aesthetics and politics of Romanticism.” Insisting that “both white people and Indian people contributed to the invention
and modification of these cultural types,” he demonstrates that “Romantic Indians conditioned views of real Indians on both
sides of the Atlantic, in some instances influencing policy decisions of colonial officials.”
33 Interest in Native American traditions played two significant roles in Romanticism’s engagement with the concept and definition
of culture: on the one hand, Native American traditions were read in the context of an increasingly racialized cultural theory
that naturalized and implicitly condoned the extermination of Native Americans;
34 on the other, the possibility opened up of studying Native American cultures in their
own right and developing protocols for ethnographic study.
35 Transatlantic Romanticism
thus both enabled and challenged constructions of cultural authenticity.
In a move similar to resistance to what Kirsten Silva Gruesz has called the “imperial conflation of America with the United
States,” the study of British Romanticism has undergone a hemispheric turn that parallels the turn in American literary studies
to American territories other than the United States.
36 Emphasizing the impact that William Robertson’s
History of America (1777) had on Romantic historiography and poetry, scholars have been exploring the intersections between British Romanticism
and Latin America, shifting Anglo-American literary relations away from their exclusive focus on the United States, and integrating
the Caribbean and Latin America into Romantic thought.
37Thus while the terms transatlantic and Romanticism have both undergone significant redefinitions, they have gained traction
from these developments: “Transatlanticism as a critical model admits and depends on the fluidity of language and identity,
and of entertaining multiple points of departure and reception for texts.”
38 The most interesting and exciting developments in the field challenge the associations of nation
and language as epistemological hegemons that structure literary studies.
39
The transatlantic circulation of Romantic texts has also given rise to alternative ways of imagining gender and sexuality. Suggesting that we must examine “the dynamics of cultural exchange in the larger Atlantic world and explore
the sexual cultures” they generated, Clare Lyons argues that:
a comparative cultural analysis will help develop a history of homoeroticism that conceptualizes the port cities as part of
an Atlantic cultural web, that follows the movement of bodies and texts through these cultural waterways, that draws on our
knowledge of the pivotal transformations in English and western European conceptualizations of homoeroticism in the eighteenth
century, and that analyzes the links in popular culture between colonial ports and European metropolitan centers during a
century that saw both Europeans and colonial British North Americans become intrigued by literary representations of homoerotic
desire.
40
Linking the circulation of bodies to the circulation of texts, she argues that “new constructions of sexuality traveled across
the Atlantic with colonists and seamen and in cargoes of books, pamphlets, and newspapers.”
41However, thinking about the role that gender
and sexuality played in transatlantic spaces is complicated by Hortense Spillers’s argument that the Middle Passage destroyed
not only the black family
, but gender categories as such: “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book” (originally published in 1987) raises
important questions about the way in which the Middle Passage ungendered its victims.
42 For Gilroy, the subjectivity and counter-culture that emerged in the black Atlantic were implicitly masculine: his case studies
all focused on men, to the neglect not only of women but of gender and sexuality as categories of analysis. Others have tried
to correct that oversight by inquiring how the transatlantic shapes our understanding of gender and sexuality, and how gender
and sexuality might help us to understand the transatlantic.
43 Susan Stanford Friedman’s work in particular has provided a counterpoint to Gilroy by recovering an explicitly feminist counter-modernity,
where women embraced transnation
alism as an alternative to oppressive nationalisms. While stating that “the basic contradiction of feminism and geopolitics
is this: how can a woman feel ‘at home’ when her home nation is built upon gender oppression?,” Friedman cautions against
seeing transnationalism as a feminist utopia, pointing to the problem of women’s own complicity in structures of gendered
and racial oppression.
44The idea that the domestic (the family, the household, and the nation) is not the opposite of the transnational but one of
its loci is central to the work of Amy Kaplan. Taking as her point of departure scholarship in the early 1990s that reexamined
the separation between the domestic and the public sphere, Kaplan observes that “this deconstruction of separate spheres…leaves
another structural opposition intact: the domestic in intimate opposition to the foreign.”
45 Kaplan argues that we need to understand the domestic as saturated with discourses of transnationalism, and especially of
race and gender. In
Reproducing Empire (2002), Laura Briggs too argues that relationships between nations are played out through “domestic” matters of reproduction
and sexuality, which are central to the way in which nations negotiate their own identities and relations to each other. This
makes the “domestic” too a transnational category. Briggs, McCormick, and Way’s intervention into the debate over the term
“transnationalism,” which subsumes the transatlantic, “suggest[s] that ‘transnationalism’ can do to the nation what gender
did for sexed bodies: provide the conceptual acid that denaturalizes all their deployments, compelling us to acknowledge that
the nation, like sex, is a thing contested, interrupted, and always shot through with contradiction.”
46 They insist that feminist scholarship was engaged with questions of transnationalism
before the “Third Wave” made it central to the intellectual discipline in the 1990s, arguing that “[Joan] Scott identified
four elements of gender
: (1) culturally available symbols; (2) normative concepts that set forth interpretations of the meaning of the symbols; (3)
social institutions and organizations thus conditioned (ranging from kinship, the household, and the family to more formal
institutions); and, finally, (4) subjective identity. With just a few changes in wording, Scott’s formulation of gender as
a category can also apply to the nation
,” by way of then subjecting the term nation to an inquiry into its deep incoherence as a category, and as a formation we
can only understand transnationally.
47
Yet it would be a mistake to dismiss too quickly the complex role that “the nation” plays for transatlantic Romanticism. A
fundamental reassessment of the relationship between literature and nation is currently under way, inaugurated by Benedict
Anderson’s influential
Imagined Communities (1991). Arguing that the novel was uniquely suited to produce a sense of simultaneity and national identification, Anderson
made it key to understanding cultural-political formations.
48 Following Anderson, Americanists “have taken the nation-novel connection as axiomatic: the tales of sympathy, seduction,
incest, and captivity that typify early American novels
have been primarily interpreted as allegories of American nationhood – as narratives that thematize the vicissitudes of citizenship
and national identity in the new polity.”
49 Building on the earlier work of Ann Douglas, Cathy Davidson, and Jane Tompkins, critics in the 1990s, such as Julia Stern
and Elizabeth Barnes, made sentimentality and sympathetic identification veritable shibboleths for reading American fiction.
They demonstrated that, under the influence of such seminal works as Adam Smith’s
The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), literature from the late eighteenth through the nineteenth century worked out its relationship to racial and political
difference through a theory of sympathetic identification. Important as theories of sentimentality have been for explaining
a mechanism by which American novels negotiate difference, discussion has focused primarily on the relationship between characters
in novels, on the reader’s sympathetic identification with those characters, and on the national bond such sympathetic readings
foster. That emphasis led to tautology: by identifying with characters in novels, readers become part of a national community,
and characters with whom readers identify become national characters.
The tautological claim that literature produces the nation
that is unified by national literature has been critiqued by scholars of transatlantic literature. Wai-Chee Dimock, for example,
takes issue with Benedict Anderson’s equation of imagined communities with nations, arguing that a literary “continuum extends
across space and time, messing up territorial sovereignty and numerical chronology.” Dimock insists that literature, “theorized
as the consequences of this global readership…handily outlives the finite scope of the nation. It brings into play a different
set of temporal and spatial coordinates. It urges on us the entire planet as a unit of analysis.”
50This claim is in keeping with debates over “world literature” which appear in Goethe’s invention of that concept and Margaret
Fuller’s analysis of its transatlantic provenance.
51 Charles Timothy Brooks’s review of Dwight’s
Select Minor Poems, Translated from the German of Goethe and Schiller (1839) argues that nation is useful for understanding how globalism relates to particulars. In praising this volume, the
New York Review indicated the kind of transatlantic sensibility current at the time:
Poetry fills in the world of thought the same place as flowers in the physical universe. Every clime has its own peculiar
plants…The universal mind has likewise its clime and soil; the spirits of the south and of the north are as unlike as the
flowers of the torrid and of the frigid zones; but in the same manner their thoughts, originally molded in different languages,
may be made known to each other, though with the loss of much of their own freshness and beauty. Translations are, after all,
but pressed flowers; yet they may unfold to us much that is new in the infinite variety of the thoughts of the human mind.
52
Translations were valued for their ability to communicate literature written in other languages and places to an American
readership, and for enabling a world literature to come into existence that could negotiate desires for transnational cultural
formation and national specificity, as I have argued at greater length elsewhere.
53
To understand the relationship between national specificity and global circulation, it will be helpful to reflect on the kinds
of textual and literary production that generated and were in turn generated by transatlantic Romanticism. Until the 1850s,
academic life was still largely dominated by classicism and scholars of antiquity, as Caroline Winterer has pointed out.
54 Romanticism developed as a popular-cultural discourse.
Whereas nineteenth-century British culture celebrated authorship and major works, the practice of anonymous publication was
widespread in the thriving American magazine and newspaper market. British copyright laws gave individuals control over their
words, but Americans by and large did not like the idea that words could be private property and wanted to keep them within
the public domain. As Meredith McGill has demonstrated, Americans saw written texts as public property that copyright only
removed temporarily from the public sphere to a realm of private ownership.
55 The idea that Americans held common property in literary texts made textual circulation an important component of public,
democratic, literary life and fostered a “non-egocentric concept of authorship,” manifested for instance in Henry Wadsworth
Longfellow’s “rejection of the notion that an author be the sole originator and proprietor of his or her work.”
56 The first copyright act of the United States, enacted in 1790, protected only American authors. Publishers were not required
to pay royalties to foreign authors, making it very attractive for American publishers to republish British works. Copyright
provided an economic incentive for the “Sir Walter disease” to become a pandemic. Under these provisions, a vibrant practice
of reprinting arose: it was common to republish or translate texts, till copyright law was tightened in the 1850s and 1890s.
Two publications proved particularly relevant for fostering transatlantic reading practices: the
North American Review and the
Dial. The
North American Review was founded in 1816 by Edward Everett, and hoped to educate a broad-scale populace about world cultures and the linguistic
and literary peculiarities of different languages and literatures.
57 Translation became an important method for popularizing transatlantic Romanticism. One of the
Dial’s legacies was its close connection with the first series of literary translation
s, the fourteen-volume
Specimens of Foreign Standard Literature (1838–42), edited by George Ripley. These volumes included
Select Minor Poems, Translated from the German of Goethe and Schiller (1839), Margaret Fuller’s translation of Johann Eckermann’s
Conversations with Goethe in the Last Years of his Life,
58 and Charles Timothy Brooks’s translated
Songs and Ballads (1842). Rather than focusing on individual authors, these volumes attempted to facilitate a broader cultural understanding
of literatures produced in other countries. The most extensive effort to create a transatlantic anthology was undertaken by
Longfellow. In 1845, he published his massive collection of
Poems and Poetry of Europe. The initial publication had over 700 pages, and Longfellow added to that a supplement of over 340 pages in 1871. The poems
in the volume were
represented by country of origin, and Longfellow himself translated poetry from eight languages into English.
As these publishing practices indicate, Romanticism
fueled American engagement with questions of linguistic and cultural transmission. That interest did not extend only to the
European context: writers generated and participated in a fascination for all things exotic and oriental. Distinctions were
drawn between cultures that were represented as participants in world literature, and cultures that were merely an object
of study and contemplation. Addressing this unevenness, Edward Said observed that “Orientalism” was a broad-scale cultural
phenomenon by which Western cultures created an image of the Orient as an object of desire that was nevertheless portrayed
as being inferior to European culture.
59 This interest was sparked by two crucial “discoveries”:
The Arabian Nights, which circulated widely in translation during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and the Rosetta stone.
As John Irwin has demonstrated, Jean-François Champollion’s deciphering of Egyptian hieroglyphics in the 1820s with the help
of the Rosetta stone aroused keen interest in the antiquities of Egypt and preoccupied the transatlantic literary imagination.
60 The
North American Review published many articles on this subject; but the broader cultural ramifications can also be seen in the references that American
authors such as Ralph Waldo Emerson or Walt Whitman make to hieroglyphics in their writings – for instance when Whitman talks
in
Leaves of Grass (1855) about grass as a “uniform hieroglyphic.”
61Transatlantic Romanticism challenges us to question how we conduct literary analysis – whether we emphasize authors or texts,
history or geography, nation or transnation, race or gender, and how those choices shape and reshape our objects of analysis.
Reflecting on the publication practices I just outlined, for instance, enables us to identify notions of authorship and textuality
invisible to national studies of Romanticism. Transatlantic Romanticism has a profound impact on how we understand literary
genres and the (dis)unity of individual literary texts. Documenting for instance the circulation of balladeering collections
in Ireland and North America, Maureen McLane considers the “hybrid imagined community” that arises in “the historical dialectic
between nationalism and imperialism.” These practices led to texts inhabiting different contexts and producing diverse meanings:
“Such a specimen as the Cherokee Death Song could move among very different cultural frames over several decades, serving
as evidence for several disparate kinds of cultural argument.”
62Transatlantic Romanticism enables kinds of cultural analysis that the national frame forecloses – for instance, Elizabeth
Young’s recent examination of the complex transatlantic circulation of Mary Shelley’s
Frankenstein. Arguing that the text’s “fantastic as well as foreign” nature “increases, rather than impedes, its racial significance to
American culture,” Young demonstrates how “the English story of a monster made in a European laboratory…has as domestic a
claim on American literary culture as that of the slave in his cabin.” Making “a case for the American dimensions of the black
Frankenstein story,” this text “also uses
Frankenstein to situate U.S. culture in an international frame…In moving
Frankenstein into U.S. culture, I also confirm the necessity of keeping it in a transatlantic orbit.” Demonstrating how a literary metaphor
can take on different meanings in transatlantic contexts, Young reads Shelley’s monster as “a metaphor for metaphor itself.”
63A particularly provocative challenge to this way of reading the transatlantic in relation to its symbolic currency comes from
Elisa Tamarkin’s reconfiguration of the Anglo-American literary relationships in terms of
Anglophilia: “If England remained a compelling object of attention, it was because it mattered that much less to a nation that had successfully
thrown it off. A profound reinvestment in the symbolic authority of England thus served as an index to the loss of real authority
for an empire and monarchy.” Tamarkin argues that “looking back from beyond independence, Americans remembered their experience
of empire as an elegiac fantasy of rank, stability, and paternal authority, where the life of the metropolis was reproduced
in the society of Britons overseas.”
64 This reading makes
Anglophilia akin to the “Lost Cause” mythology that Twain references when he holds Sir Walter Scott’s notions of chivalry accountable
for the American Civil War, and uses humor to capture the emptiness and power of such symbolic forms.
At this time, “Transatlantic Romanticism” has almost become a scholarly truism; it has become all but inconceivable to think
of Romanticism as anything other than transatlantic. Yet what we mean by “transatlantic” remains contested, especially in
relation to other terms such as transnational, international, circum-Atlantic, global. As Heidi Slettedahl Macpherson and
Will Kaufman argue, “Circum-Atlanticism is the term used by scholars who wish to suggest that their particular vision of the
Atlantic is one which is more inclusive and all-embracing, yet the circum-prefix, suggesting
‘around, surrounding, or on all sides,’ appears to us to be ‘inclusive’ only in the respect of blurring localities – a criticism
also lobbied at scholars who embrace a non-specific globalization which denies the particularized space that remains so important
to individuals, if even on a mythic level.”
65 That attachment to the particulars of the “nation
” is especially important in relation to Romanticism, where it introduces an “element not only of ‘contact,’ but also of ‘conflict’
– and, for Transatlantic Studies, a major point of conflict is national identity, which, like the separate foci of area studies,
refuses to give up the ghost.”
66 In sorting through these competing strands, David Armitage has proposed a three-pronged approach that distinguishes between
“three concepts of Atlantic history: 1.
Circum-Atlantic history – the transnational history of the Atlantic world. 2.
Trans-Atlantic history – the international history of the Atlantic world. 3.
Cis-Atlantic history – national or regional history within an Atlantic context.”
67 What makes this kind of organization both useful and frustrating is the fact that these different strands intersect in Romanticism.
Indeed, Mark Twain’s assessment of Sir Walter Scott speaks to those intersections: Twain resuscitates Percy Shelley’s claim
that poets (or in this case novelists) are the unacknowledged legislators of the world. Pointing to transatlantic Romanticism
as a cultural formation that extends beyond individual authors to generate political transformations, Twain locates us at
the intersection between cultural influences and the political unconscious. In blaming Scott for the Civil War, Twain is perhaps
participating in, perhaps drawing attention to, the workings of the transatlantic’s racial unconscious. Scholars over the
past several decades have undertaken the task of explaining that unconscious to us, and of making newly legible the serious
stakes of Twain’s humorous assessment.