A broad, comparative and trans-Atlantic approach to the Age of Revolutions

Cutting across disciplines and linguistic borders, this book explores the dissemination and transformation of revolutionary ideas in the period between the mid-eighteenth century and the revolutions of 1848. In addition to revolutionary movements in Europe and the United States, it deals with the international impact of the Haitian Revolution. The chapters in the book adopt transnational approaches to revolution to show how political uprisings often reverberated far beyond the borders of the states directly affected – in the form of narratives, metaphors, translations, letters, pamphlets and dialogues, as well as physical objects.

Reassesses American elitisms of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.

Arguing that Henry Adams, Henry James and Edith Wharton articulated their political thought in response to the liberalism that reigned in Boston and, more specifically, at Harvard University, this book shows how each of these authors interrogated that liberalism's arguments for education, democracy and the political duties of the cultivated elite. Coit shows that the works of these authors contributed to a realist critique of a liberal New England idealism that fed into the narrative about 'the genteel tradition', which shaped the study of US literature during the twentieth century.

In this book, Stefanie Schäfer provides the first study of the Yankee’s many facets. Reading together Yankee Doodle, Brother Jonathan, Uncle Sam, the Yankee Peddler and the Down Easter, she highlights the Yankee’s ambiguity: His performance hinges on storytelling and fraudulence. An invention of transatlantic origin, the Yankee straddles regional and sectional, rural and urban, working class and bourgeois US identities. For nineteenth-century audiences at home and abroad, he becomes the hegemonic embodiment of US national character, its political and material culture and the homespun agent of its imperial fantasies.

This book focuses on three undertakings at Nova Scotia (1620s), East New Jersey (1680s) and the Isthmus of Panama, then known as Darien (1690s). Analysing works written in the larger context of the Scottish Atlantic, it examines how the Atlantic influenced seventeenth-century Scottish literature and vice versa. The relationship between art and ideology is key to the author’s discussion as Sandrock argues early modern writing employed utopianism as a tool for empire-building and as a means of claiming power over the Atlantic.

Since around 2000, there has been a noticeable upsurge in critical work on the visual archive of Atlantic slavery, resulting in a host of important studies. While most of these contributions are weighted towards images created during the era of slavery itself, some critics have adopted a more historically far-reaching approach, exploring the ways in which such images live on beyond the original context of their production, circulation and consumption, returning imaginatively in different forms at different times and in different places. This book shares the fascination with the afterlives which such visual materials have enjoyed, but places the accent on how that posterity has evolved in the realms of literature, especially poetry. It focuses on transactions between texts written between the mid-1990s and 2020 and images of slavery that belong to British, American and (in one case) French traditions, as produced between c. 1779 and 1939.

Walcott's lifelong concern with painting and painters deeply inflected his aesthetics and politics. Walcott's interventions on the relationship between Caribbean and colonial history have been thoroughly scrutinised, but, arguably, Walcott was also keen to address and (re)write an art history 'of which,' paraphrasing a line from 'Omeros', the Caribbean 'too' was/is 'capable'. Contextualising and putting in conversation Walcott's published and unpublished writings (poems, plays, essays, journalism) and his drawings or paintings (privately owned and publicly disseminated) with specific artists from the Caribbean, Europe, South and North America, Derek Walcott's Painters recalibrates and sharpens our understanding of Walcott's articulation of his own politics and poetics and of the Caribbean's contributions to Atlantic and global culture.

What is a reference to an Italian Egyptologist doing in Louisa May Alcott's portrait of domesticity in Little Women? Why does Elizabeth Stuart Phelps's painter protagonist Avis Dobell know - and care - that her red shawl is dyed with desiccated beetles? Why might W. E. B. Du Bois's fictional sharecropper display a reproduction of a painting by William-Adolphe Bouguereau near his cotton field? These questions, and more, are answered by Consuming Empire in US Fiction, 1865-1930. An interdisciplinary study of references to internationally-traded commodities in US fiction, this book assembles an integrated geopolitical analysis of Americans' material, gendered, and aesthetic experiences of empire at the turn of the twentieth century. Examining allusions to contested goods like cochineal, cotton, oranges, fur, gold, pearls, porcelain, and wheat, it reveals a linked global imagination among authors who were often directly or indirectly critical of US imperial ambitions. Furthermore, the book considers the commodification of art itself, interpreting writers' allusions to paintings, sculptures, and artists as self-aware acknowledgments of their own complicity in global capitalism. As Consuming Empire in US Fiction, 1865-1930 demonstrates, literary texts have long trained consumers to imagine their relationship to the world through the things they own.