Atlantic Citizens: Nineteenth-Century American Writers at Work in the World
Author(s): Leslie Eckel (Author)
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Publication Date: 18 Feb. 2013
Language: English
Print length: 248 pages
ISBN-10: 074866937X
ISBN-13: 9780748669370
Book Description
This is a rediscovery of the bold cosmopolitan activism and professional literary adventures of six antebellum writers. By looking beyond the familiar works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, Grace Greenwood, Margaret Fuller and Frederick Douglass to their public commentaries in lectures, reviews, and newspaper columns, this study uncovers their startling contributions to transatlantic culture. Leslie Eckel argues that writing American literature was only one among their many vocational pursuits and that their work was powerfully influenced by wide-ranging political engagements and transnational friendships. The book’s chapters balance close readings of primary texts, both literary (poems, essays) and non-literary (newspaper articles, lectures) with critically informed discussions of writers’ transatlantic experiences. While each focuses on a single author, each converses with other chapters on the subjects of nationalism, cosmopolitanism, creativity, and reform. It questions the ‘American’ identity of representative authors, even as they test the moral and geographical limits of American nationality. It demonstrates the political and commercial power of transatlantic networking. It illuminates literature’s dependence upon other modes of professional creativity. It examines archival documents alongside familiar literary works.
Editorial Reviews
Review
This book represent a fine contribution to transatlantic scholarship…Eckel’s way of recontextualizing authors according to their ‘vocational routes’ offers illuminating new readings of canonical American writers. –Journal of American Studies, 48
Each chapter of Atlantic Citizens is deeply grounded in criticism, history, biography and close textual analysis. Leslie Eckel’s prose is largely jargon free and sparkles with shrewd insights and delightful wit. Her book is a bold declaration that transatlantic literary study is as vital as ever. –Emerson Society Papers, Vol 25, Number 1
From the Back Cover
[series info to be added]A rediscovery of the bold cosmopolitan activism and professional literary adventures of six antebellum writersBy looking beyond the page and into the extraordinary lives of Walt Whitman, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Grace Greenwood, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller and Frederick Douglass, this book uncovers their startling contributions to transatlantic culture and makes the argument that literature is dependent upon other modes of professional creativity in order to thrive.Leslie Elizabeth Eckel shows how these six figures shaped their careers in the fields of education, journalism, public lecturing and editing in productive relation to their development as imaginative writers. To see Walt Whitman co-producing foreign editions of his work with British poets while exuberantly breaking free from verse strictures on the page, or to witness Margaret Fuller reporting from the battle ground in revolutionary Rome as well as writing her country’s first feminist treatise is to comprehend more deeply the ways in which these writers acted in the transatlantic sphere. By practicing Atlantic citizenship, they were able to achieve critical distance from the United States and, paradoxically, to catalyse its ongoing growth.Leslie Elizabeth Eckel is Assistant Professor of English at Suffolk University in Boston. She is the author of numerous essays on nineteenth-century American literature and transatlantic studies and the editor with Joel Pace of ‘Boston and the New Atlantic World’, a special issue of Symbiosis: A Journal of Anglo-American Literary Relations.Cover image: Ship Monterey of Boston. Entering the Port of Genoa 1851. Unidentified artist. Courtesy of the Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Massachusetts.Cover design:[EUP logo]www.euppublishing.com
About the Author
Leslie Elizabeth Eckel is Assistant Professor of English at Suffolk University in Boston.
Wow! eBook
