Traveling Traditions: Nineteenth-Century Cultural Concepts and Transatlantic Intellectual Networks

Description

This study seeks to fill a major gap in the fields of Nineteenth-Century American and British Studies by examining how nineteenth-century intellectuals shaped and re-shaped aesthetic traditions across the Atlantic Ocean. Special attention is paid to a group of salient cultural concepts, such as artist-as-hero, imagination, the picturesque, reform, simultaneity, and seriality. Although embedded in a particular aesthetic tradition, these concepts travel from one culture to another and are transformed along their transatlantic journeys. The purpose of this book is to explore the roles of these 'traveling concepts' within the realm of transatlantic cultures and to trace their at times surprising paths within ever-widening transnational intellectual networks. Contents Preface Part I: The American Renaissance Revisited 1. Transatlantic Literary Networks: E. A. Poe from Germany to Russia to Chicago 2. American Realism in Its Transatlantic Context 3. Genteel Pragmatism in Nineteenth-Century America and Great Britain Part II: Cultural Authority and Transatlantic Aesthetics 4. The (Traveling) Reform Tradition in Nineteenth-Century Anglo-America 5. Of Heroes and Mockingbirds: Transatlantic Translations and the Struggle between ‘High’ and ‘Low’ Cultures in Nineteenth-Century America 6. The Transatlantic Dante in the Nineteenth Century: Literary Authority and Reception Histories 7. The Artist as Hero: Nineteenth-Century Concepts of Authorship in a Transatlantic Perspective Part III: Broadening the Genteel Circle: Race and Gender 8. Frederick Douglass, Photography, and Imagination 9. Romantic Folk Culture and The Souls of Black Folk: Framing the Beginnings of African-American Culture Studies in Cross-Atlantic Traveling Concepts 10. Fuller, Feminism, Foreign Correspondence 11. Byronic Heroines and Darwinian Types: Southern Women’s (Post-) Bellum Identity Construction Part IV: The Medium is the Message: Transatlantic Media Networks 12. Stereoscopy and the Global Picturesque 13. On Transatlantic Simultaneity and Misunderstanding Telegraphy 14. (Un)Settling North America: The Yankee in the Writings of John Neal and Thomas Chandler Haliburton 15. Transatlantic Politics as Serial Networks in the German-American City Mystery Novel, 1850–1855 Contributors Index