Transoceanic America

Michelle Burnham is Professor of English at Santa Clara University, where she specializes in early American literature, Native American literature, transoceanic studies, and popular culture. She is the author of Folded Selves: Colonial New England Writing in the World System and Captivity and Sentiment: Cultural Exchange in American Literature, 1682-1861 (both with the Univ. Press of New England). She has edited A Separate Star: Selected Writings of Helen Hunt Jackson (Heyday Press) and the 1767 novel The Female American (Broadview Press). She is currently working on a project that brings together literary history, book history, and digital humanities to recover the transoceanic genre of castaway fiction.

• PrefaceIntroduction: Transoceanic AmericaPart One: Connecting the Pacific and the Atlantic1: Narrative: Trade and Time in Early Pacific Travel Writing2: Numbers: Calculation and Speculation in the Eighteenth-Century Novel3: Politics: Violence and Gender in the Revolutionary Pacific4: Circles: Seduction and Rebellion in The Travels of Hildebrand Bowman5: Coils: Global Politics and Economic Futurity in Ormond6: Cycles: Atlantic Slavery and Pacific Botany in Obi7: Circuits: Female Bodies and Capitalist Drive in Secret HistoryEpilogue: Towards a Transoceanic American Literary History

Through this new vision, the author revisits both canonical and noncanonical texts and reconsiders issues of empire, slavery, cannibalism, revolution, consumption, and the female body. What Burnham ultimately offers is a new sense of American literary history grounded in the networks of commercial, political, and textual ties and derived from the vast and intertwined water world of the Atlantic and the Pacific. ... Highly recommended.