TRANSATLANTIC LITERARY STUDIES, 1660–1830

The recently developed field of transatlantic literary studies has encouraged scholars to move beyond national literatures towards an examination of communications between Britain and the Americas. The true extent and importance of these material and literary exchanges is only just beginning to be discovered. This collection of original essays explores the transatlantic literary imagination during the key period from 1660 to 1830: from the colonization of the Americas to the formative decades following political separation between the nations. Contributions from leading scholars from both sides of the Atlantic bring a variety of approaches and methods to bear on both familiar and forgotten texts. Revealing how literary genres were borrowed and readapted to a different context, the volume offers an index of the larger literary influences going backwards and forwards across the ocean.

EVE TAVOR BANNET is George Lynn Cross Professor of English at the University of Oklahoma. Her books include The Domestic Revolution (2000), Empire of Letters (Cambridge, 2005), and Transatlantic Stories and the History of Reading: Migrant Fictions 1720–1810 (Cambridge, 2011). She has recently edited a four-volume collection of British and American Letter Manuals 1680–1810 (2008) and an edition of Emma Corbett (2011).

SUSAN MANNING is Grierson Professor of English Literature, and Director of the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh. She works on the Scottish Enlightenment and on Scottish–American literary relations, the topic of her comparative studies The Puritan-Provincial Vision (1990) and Fragments of Union (2001). She is one of the editors of the Edinburgh History of Scottish Literature (3 vols., 2006), and has co-edited the first Transatlantic Literary Studies Reader (2007).