Longlisted for the Wales Book of the Year 2007
Writing in 1903, W. E. B. Du Bois suggested that the goal for the African-American was 'to be a co-worker in the kingdom of culture'.
He was evoking 'culture' as a solution to the divisions within society, thereby adopting, in a very different context, an idea that had been influentially expressed by Matthew Arnold in the 1860s. Du Bois questioned the assumed universality of this concept by asking who, ultimately, is allowed into the 'kingdom of culture'? How does one come to speak from a position of cultural authority?
This book...

This book, the first fully sustained reading of Henry James's and Oscar Wilde's relationship, reveals why the antagonisms between both authors are symptomatic of the cultural oppositions within Aestheticism itself. The book also shows how these conflicting energies animated the late nineteenth century's most exciting transatlantic cultural enterprise. Richly illustrated and historically detailed, this study of James's and Wilde's intricate, decades-long relationship brings to light Aestheticism's truly transatlantic nature through close readings of both authors' works, as well as...

During the 19th century the U.S. and Britain came to share an economic profile unparalleled in their respective histories. This book suggests that this early high capitalism came to serve as the ground for a new kind of cosmopolitanism in the age of literary realism, and argues for the necessity of a transnational analysis based upon economic relationships of which people on both sides of the Atlantic were increasingly conscious. The nexus of this exploration of economics, aesthetics and moral philosophy is philanthropy.
Pushing beyond reductive debates over the benevolent or mercenary...

This study takes as its point of departure an essential premise: that the widespread phenomenon of expatriation in American modernism is less a flight from the homeland than a dialectical return to it, but one which renders uncanny all tropes of familiarity and immediacy which 'fatherlands' and 'mother tongues' are traditionally seen as providing. In this framework, similarly totalising notions of cultural authenticity are seen to govern both exoticist mystification and 'nativist' obsessions with the purity of the 'mother tongue.' At the same time, cosmopolitanism, translation, and...

Transatlantic Women's Literature is a valuable contribution to the evolving debate surrounding Transatlantic Studies and transatlantic literature. Its originality and importance lie in its focus on 20th-century women's narratives of travel and adventure, and its deliberate expansion of the Transatlantic concept beyond the familiar US-UK axis to include Canada, South America, the Caribbean, and Eastern Europe. The crisscrossing of the Atlantic is contested and problematised throughout. The book explores culturally resonant literature that imagines 'views from both sides' and examines the...

Cultural Authority in the Age of Whitman deals with narratives of cultural legitimation in nineteenth-century US literature, in a transatlantic context. Exploring how literary professionalism shapes romantic and modern cultural space, Leypoldt traces the nineteenth-century fusion of poetic radicalism with cultural nationalism from its beginnings in transatlantic early romanticism, to the poetry and poetics of Walt Whitman, and Whitman's modernist reinvention as an icon of a native avant-garde. Whitman made cultural nationalism compatible with the rhetorical needs of professional authorship by...

Robert Southey did not exaggerate when he described the England of his day as "South American mad." As Spain's hold on its colonies progressively weakened during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, thousands of British scientists, soldiers, entrepreneurs, and settlers rushed to take advantage of the enticing opportunities Spanish America offered. Britain's fascination with the region displayed itself in poems, plays, operas, political tracts, news reportage, travel narratives, and stock market quotations. Creole patriots such as Francisco de Miranda and Andres Bello gathered...

In Mercenaries in British and American Literature, 1790-1830, Erik Simpson proposes the mercenary as a meeting point of psychological, national, and ideological issues that connected the severed nations of Britain and America following the American Revolution.When writers treat the figure of the mercenary in literary works, the general issues of incentive, independence, and national service become intertwined with two of the well-known social developments of the period: an increased ability of young people to choose their spouses and the shift from patronage to commercial, market-based...

Transnationalism in Practice brings together fourteen essays written by Paul Giles between 1994 and 2009 on the subjects of American studies, literature and religion.
In an introduction written especially for the collection, Giles traces the evolution of critical transnationalism as it developed through the 1980s and 1990s. The volume includes "Reconstructing American Studies" (1994), one of the first articles to address the field from a transnational perspective, along with other pieces on methodological and practical issues surrounding the internationalization of American studies....