Transatlantic Literature and Author Love in the Nineteenth Century

Paul Westover is Associate Professor of English at Brigham Young University, USA. He is the author of Necromanticism: Traveling to Meet the Dead, 1750–1860 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), co-editor of the Romantic Circles edition of Wordsworth’s Guide to the Lakes (2015), and Book Review Editor for the Journal of British Studies. Ann Wierda Rowland is Associate Professor of English at the University of Kansas, USA. She is the author of British Romanticism and Childhood (2012) and numerous essays on British Romantic-era literature. Her current research centers on the American reception of Keats.

• Introduction: Reading, Reception, and the Rise of Transatlantic ‘English’; Ann Wierda Rowland and Paul Westover.- 1. American Idiom: Sara Hale’s Flora’s Interpreter and the Figuration of National Identity; Kelli Towers Jasper.- 2. Bentley’s Standard Novelist: James Fenimore Cooper; Joseph Rezek.- 3. ‘The American Tennyson’ and ‘The English Longfellow’: Inverted Audiences and Popular Poetry; Sharon Estes.- 4. The Americans in the English Men of Letters; Ryan Stuart Lowe.- 5. ‘The Author Makes the Reader Acquainted with His Abode’: Hawthorne as Transatlantic Tour Guide in The Marble Faun and ‘The Old Manse’; Charles Baraw.- 6. The Transatlantic Home Network: Discovering Sir Walter Scott in American Authors’ Houses; Paul Westover.- 7. Wordsworthshire and Thoreau Country: Transatlantic Landscapes of Genius; Scott Hess.- 8. Helen A. Clarke and Charlotte Endymion Porter: Literary Criticism in Author Country a Century Ago; Alison Booth.- 9. Transatlantic Reception and Commemoration of the ‘Poet of the Scotch’, Robert Burns; Christopher A. Whatley.- 10. Loving, Knowing, and Illustrating Keats: the Louis Arthur Holman Collection of Keats Iconography; Ann Wierda Rowland.- 11. The Unofficial Force”: Irregular Author Love and the Higher Criticism; Charles J. Rzepka.- Index.

“The volume as a whole proves unusually elegant in conception and rewards reading straight through. A thorough and careful introduction is followed by a series of meticulously edited, carefully contextualized, frequently illustrated, and often imaginatively constructed individual case studies by a mix of scholars, which effectively showcase several possible methodologies for studying transatlantic literary culture.” (Nicola J. Watson, Victorian Studies, Vol. 60 (4), 2018)“This collection explores nineteenth-century readers, their reading, and the invention of ‘English’ as a transnational identity. … Readers will find much to admire in these individual authors' contributions. As for the volume as a whole, it astutely assembles key terms and critical conversations in need of further analysis in relation to each other.” (Julia Hansen, Review19, nbol-19.org, July, 2017)