Having already played a significant role in the turn toward transatlantic literary studies with Transatlantic Insurrections (2001) and Virtual Americas (2002), in his new book Paul Giles pursues some familiar themes from a fresh angle. For while the two earlier books largely focus on the response of American writers to British culture, and so by extension seek to reconfigure the boundaries of American Studies, Atlantic Republic “switches the emphasis to ways in which the development of US society in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries served to create a potential space for dissent within modern English literature” (vii). An examination of English attitudes toward the sociopolitical values of the New World exposes the contours of the nationalistic mindset, Giles argues, allowing us to apprehend an alternative to the organicist, implicitly Anglican model of the English literary tradition that runs from Johnson and Wordsworth through Arnold and Leavis to Jonathan Bate. Taking the schismatically critical example of the Reformation as its metaphorical touchstone, this alternative, world-oriented, tradition seeks to achieve “transposed perspectives on English literature and culture” (4) by reflecting it off and through the American republic.

Giles begins with the War of Independence, emphasizing how the newly founded United States served as an instantiation of latent English liberties for eighteenth-century radicals like Richard Price, and then as a “putative corrective” (50) to the self-convergent visions of cultural integrity proposed by the Lake School during the era of Parliamentary Reform. Romantic cosmopolitans like Byron and Mary Shelley are, however, “the last generation … for whom the American republic comprised not just a different but an alternative and potentially viable way of life” (54), and in chapter 3 Giles explores how the diplomatic stand-off between Britain and America over the Oregon Country fed into the anglophobic underpinnings of Transcendentalism and the growing perception among writers like Dickens that the US was alien and threatening. The desire to negate the American republic by affirming English domesticity is, though, countered by Arthur Hugh Clough, whose dialogic engagement with Transcendentalism positively positions the US as a “disruptive influence” (112), paving the way for Wilde and Gissing's interest in America as the correlate for “a sense of moral uncertainty and epistemological insecurity” (163) at the end of the nineteenth century. Chapter 6 argues that Lawrence and Eliot's “inscription of parallel, alternate worlds whereby the impetus of modernist defamiliarization is positioned alongside a nostalgia for communal belonging” (176), as well as sharing intellectual roots with the rise of fascism, uses America as a crucial site for the modelling of this pastoral regeneration. And chapter 7 looks at how Wodehouse, Huxley and Isherwood critiqued England's postwar Othering of Nazism and retreated into class-bound provincialism through the creation of “an abstract, Americanized world of imaginative violence and utopian horizons” (244). America, too, is seen as an important destination, both physical and imaginative, for writers like Auden, Levertov and Davie, who used the New World to infuse English poetry with the disruptive modernist tendencies that had been suppressed at home. According to Giles, though, this “transatlantic balance” (257) represents the final phase of Anglo-American exchange in its conventional guise, for with the emergence of postmodernity's decentered universe in the 1970s the lines between the two nations begin irresistibly to dissolve. The pastiche-ridden fantasies of Ballard and Carter “appropriate America aesthetically to create a virtual history of what England might have been like in an alternative cosmos” (295), while the globalized, postcolonial world inhabited by writers like Rushdie and Caryl Phillips sees England's literary tradition subsumed into an English-language literary tradition which privileges the American imaginary: “By the end of the century it was US culture that had become the default model for anglophone discourse, the refractive nexus or channel through which other currents had to pass” (357).

As is perhaps inevitable with a book of such scope and ambition the pace of analysis creates lacunae. Sometimes it is simply a case of being left wanting more, as with intriguing accounts of certain novels which beg for expansion. But equally it can be a case of facility overriding precision, as with some arguments which are too thinly evidenced to be entirely convincing. More problematically, while Giles rightly dismisses the “special relationship” in its political guise as a facile illusion (instead emphasizing conflict over consensus) he seems to reassert this myth in cultural terms. On one level this manifests itself in the intimation that American culture has been more central to English thinkers than any other national culture, an intimation that rather isolates England from its near-neighbors in Europe. Giles revealingly explores the attraction for early twentieth-century writers of America and Germany as parallel sites of modernity, it is true, but England's ongoing love–hate relationship with France, for example, is slighted. On another level, too, this cultural special pleading manifests itself in a tendency to treat anything energetic or dissident in English culture as inevitably transnationalist and American in orientation. This caveat is not meant to deny the redemptive appeal of the US or the insular nature of much English writing, but it is to suggest that when Giles traces to the English Civil War “a democratic impulse … which subsequently cut itself off and migrated to America” (313) he is oversimplifying matters, and that there might be other English cultural traditions (including nationalist ones) that contest or contradict his thesis. Nonetheless, Giles's book is a magnificent achievement, which persuasively exposes the limitations in our understanding of the English literary tradition and sets the standard for a new direction in the field of transatlanticism. Elegantly written, stunningly erudite, and bristling with insights, Atlantic Republic is – for literary scholars of all stripes – a force to be reckoned with.