Appropriately enough in the context of present-day higher-education funding regimes, Leslie Elizabeth Eckel's lucid monograph turns on the question of public impact, seeking “to expand our current view of nineteenth-century American writers by asserting that understanding them simply as ‘American authors’ reduces the scope of their cultural impact in geographical and professional terms” (3). She is interested in how her chosen authors – Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Margaret Fuller, Frederick Douglass, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman and Grace Greenwood – mixed their literary vocations with social obligations across a broad public sphere, and in particular how a transatlantic dimension served to enhance these writers' sense of engagement with a wider world. Taking her theoretical cues from Paul Gilroy's Atlantic “routes” and Kwame Anthony Appiah's notion of “partial cosmopolitanism” (48), Eckel convincingly demonstrates how, for example, Fuller's views on American literature and culture were sharpened by “her cultivation of a critical, outside perspective on American national life during her years abroad” (48).

Though some of this study does cover familiar ground, in other ways it offers genuinely new and interesting perspectives on the nineteenth-century transatlantic experience. In treating her six authors, Eckel seeks to draw on records of “written statements and oral performances that have gone relatively unnoticed – and in some cases, unpublished – due to their extraliterary nature” (14), and her research here is very thorough. In her discussion of Emerson, Eckel usefully and plausibly identifies 1851 as the “turning point” (114) in the Sage of Concord's willingness to emerge from his cloistered study and engage publicly with America's increasingly fractious racial politics. Methodologically, Eckel thus follows in the footsteps of Len Gougeon's pathbreaking work, Virtue's Hero (1990), that brought back into our scholarly purview Emerson's frequent abolitionist speeches, interventions the author had not taken the trouble to include in his own published volumes of lectures on the ground that such political lectures in his eyes lacked Neoplatonic gravitas and were, by definition, of a more transitory nature. The most original chapter in Eckel's book discusses the work of Greenwood, a journalist who edited magazine letters under the title Greenwood Leaves, published a best-selling travel book entitled Haps and Mishaps of a Tour in Europe (1854), and subsequently edited for fifteen years a magazine for children rejoicing in the name The Little Pilgrim. Greenwood actively exploited her journalistic contacts and profile to promote her career in Britain, and both her popular work and her public manner provoked the private scorn of Nathaniel Hawthorne, who described her in his posthumous English Notebooks as “a hopeless old maid – with a very capacious heart cold and empty; a great yearning for admiration, never to be half-gratified” (131).

In terms of its analysis of wider theoretical issues, however, perhaps the best section here is Eckel's consideration of how Dante Gabriel Rossetti's 1868 anthology, Poems by Walt Whitman, helped to bring about what A. C. Swinburne described as “Whitmania” in Britain (166) during the latter part of the nineteenth century. Eckel illuminatingly describes in this chapter how Whitman colluded with Rossetti's suggestion that British readers, because of their more distant perspective, might be better placed to “tell Americans how to interpret their own national literature” (165). Just as Robert Crawford once suggested how the invention of English literature in the eighteenth century was a Scottish phenomenon, so Eckel suggests here that the invention of American literature in the nineteenth century was, as least in part, a British phenomenon.

On a few occasions, the author's attempt specifically to relate such public interventions to a transatlantic sphere does seem rather forced. While it is undoubtedly true, for example, that Longfellow's professorship at Harvard from 1837 to 1854 “involved just as much negotiating with a recalcitrant administration as it did teaching” (28), it may be rather a stretch to extrapolate from this a transatlantic imperative, as in Eckel's assertion that “Longfellow's vision of an ideal university offers a cosmopolitan alternative to national organization” (24). The somewhat convoluted title and subtitle of the book suggest how it is trying to yoke two ideas together, Atlanticism and the public sphere, and there are times when their conjunction appears rather thesis-driven. Overall, though, this book represents a fine contribution to transatlantic scholarship, one that, in explicitly taking issue with Jürgen Habermas, argues for the transatlantic public sphere as “potentially disruptive rather than essentially rational” (190). As she traces these cross-cultural trajectories, Eckel's way of recontextualizing authors according to their “vocational routes” (1) offers illuminating new readings of canonical American writers.