Transatlanticism

• Published in: Victorian literature and culture 2018, Vol.46 (3-4), p.917-924
• Main Author: Hughes, Linda K.
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: American literature; Brown, William Wells (1814?-1884); Collaboration; Culture; Douglass, Frederick (1818-1895); Historical text analysis; Keywords for Victorian Literature and Culture; Literature; Medieval period; Printed materials; Transnationalism; Trollope, Anthony (1815-1882); Victorian period
• ISSN: 1060-1503; 1470-1553
• DOI: 10.1017/S1060150318001183

Altered national relations resulting from revolutions (American, French, Haitian), wars, imperial ambitions, economic development and exploitation on one hand, or reform movements (abolition, expanding citizen rights and aspirations) on the other, quickened interchanges between nations around the Atlantic basin. New ideas—themselves “forms” in Caroline Levine's sense and catalysts of new literary forms—likewise quickened transatlantic interchanges and circulation whether evolution; theories of nation, history, human nature; conceptions of “literature” and text; entropy; counterfactual imagined worlds; indigeneity; models of liberation; or sexualities.2 Quickened circulation, of course, was inseparable from emergent technologies: steam-driven propulsion (of steamships, locomotives, presses, manufactures); technologies of vision (microscopes, techniques of replicating visual images in the press or on hoardings and billboards); the telegraph, and development of laboratory instruments that propelled international collaborative or competing research reported in the expanding press. When I codirected a three-year National Endowment for the Humanities project called “Making American Literatures,” for instance, every time we sent our title off to a publisher (say, for a conference session or an essay collection), the “s” would get deleted by copyeditors. [...]I embrace configurations like “transatlanticism,” which conjure up a ready mapping for audiences.