Transatlantic Literary Studies: A Reader is a groundbreaking introduction to the emerging field of transatlantic literary studies, and a work that does much to illuminate the ways in which a transatlantic framework expands the critical horizons of American and British literary studies. While editors Susan Manning and Andrew Taylor include important scholarship focused on purely Anglo-American relations, they also include essays that address the need to account for the travels of people, literatures, and translations throughout the Atlantic world. An excerpt from Amy Kaplan and Nina Gerassi-Navarro’s essay “Between Empires: Frances Calderón de la Barca’s Life in Mexico” (published in its entirety in Symbiosis 9.1) offers one rich example of the potential avenues opened up for scholars of Anglo-American relations by developments in the field of circumatlantic studies. The essay explores “how Latin America, and Mexico in particular, was central to the formation and unsettling of US American exceptionalism,” and seeks to “complicate the binary opposition of the Atlantic divide” through a reading of Scottish-born Calderón de la Barca’s Life in Mexico (59). Co-authored by an Americanist and a Latin Americanist, this essay offers one particularly compelling model for how collaborative, interdisciplinary work can help to re-map scholarship of the Atlantic world.

The Reader’s structure is also worthy of note, both for its strengths and for its necessary limitations. The collection is made up of forty-two three to nine page extracts from previously published essays. Some of the theoretical extracts included (such as those by Deleuze and Guattari, Walter Benjamin, and Roman Jakobson) were written without direct reference to the transatlantic context, while other excerpted essays (such as those by Wai Chee Dimock, Paul Gilroy, and Joseph Roach) lay the theoretical groundwork for specifically transatlantic or circumatlantic study. Still other extracts (namely those by Daniel Katz, Richard Gravil, and Leonard Tennenhouse) model an engagement with specific literary texts. The excerpts have been carefully chosen to resonate with and respond to one another. Read in order, for example, J. Hillis Miller critiques Tony Tanner’s model of U.S. exceptionalism, and Margaret McFadden’s discussion of her use of the network neatly introduces Jeremy Boissevain’s manifesto on the critical uses of network theory.

By juxtaposing such edited extracts, Manning and Taylor are able to introduce their readers to a broad range of relevant scholarship. In only a little over three hundred pages, the editors show much of the context out of which transatlantic literary studies has emerged, and point the way towards fertile areas of development within the field. At the same time, however, these heavily edited extracts exclude much of the close reading and detailed scholarship that supports and clarifies each complete essay. As a result, the collection can be read most fruitfully, not as a series of stand-alone articles, but rather as a series of intimately interrelated arguments that resonate both with each other and across the collection as a whole. The introductions to each section encourage this reading practice. In these short introductions, the editors discuss not only the context out of which individual excerpts emerged, but also how each of these excerpts contextualizes, historicizes, critiques, or advances a vision of transatlantic studies. What emerges from these juxtapositions is the field of transatlantic studies itself, aptly defined as a collectivity.

The Reader begins by raising questions about the relationship of literary texts to the nation and the (post)colony, and about the movement of literary works beyond such bounded spaces. How, these essays ask, should the circulation of texts across and around the Atlantic be understood? The first section, “The Nation and Cosmopolitanism,” recognizes the continuing power of national formations while emphasizing that the study of literary texts offers opportunities to highlight the contingency of that power. For example, Pascale Casanova’s description of the struggle for national literary prestige in the international sphere offers scholars one salient model of transnational exchange, yet depends on a traditional conception of the nation-state that other contributors call into question. Paul Giles’s essay, by contrast, warns readers against versions of transnational scholarship that serve to reinscribe U.S. exceptionalism, calling instead for work that “open[s] up the field as a site of perennial struggle and rupture” (47).

The second section, “Theories and Practice of Comparative Literature,” challenges universalist models of comparative literature that presuppose a coherent Western tradition. Instead, in the words of J. Hillis Miller, transatlantic literature is best understood as “node[s] or intersection[s] in an overdetermined network of associations, influences, constraints, and connections, often connections leaping far over chronological or geographical contiguity” (95). This concept of the network anticipates the arguments set out in Section Five, “Style and Genre,” in which Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of the rhizome suggests a model for transatlantic literary study that rejects the hierarchies of precedence that govern studies of “influence.” The third section, “Imperialism and the Postcolonial,” succinctly surveys the recent explosion of postcolonial and black diaspora studies that, the editors contend, have “encouraged and provoked” the “current interest in transatlantic scholarship” (121). Essays by Stuart Hall, Paul Gilroy, and James Snead examine the experiences of hybridity and “‘rhizomorphic’ mobility” that characterize the black diaspora (123), while Lawrence Buell argues that American Renaissance texts ask to be read as “a [p]ostcolonial [p]henomenon” (147).

   The final three sections of the Reader question how scholars might begin to address what is specifically literary about the transatlantic circulation of literature. Sections Four (“Translation”) and Five (“Style and Genre”) offer theoretical and practical models for reading cthe ways in which literary texts travel between languages and continents. Translation, the editors posit, is a specific linguistic act of interpretation and appropriation that, as its etymology suggests, carries meaning “from one discursive space to another” (168). Translating a literary work into a new national context often leads to the creation of new paratexts, and sometimes involves editorial decisions to cut, add to, or otherwise “improve” the work for a new audience. These techniques, of course, are by no means restricted to cross-lingual translation, and essays by Leonard Tennenhouse and Eve Taylor Bannet in the “Style and Genre” section cogently parse the extent to which British texts were edited and intralingually translated for a U.S. audience.

   Throughout the collection, the editors include scholarship that probingly reflects on the meaning and value of the transatlantic paradigm. In Section Five, for example, Joseph Roach challenges the utility of the transatlantic framework, writing that “[t]he concept of a circum-Atlantic world (as opposed to a transatlantic one) insists on the centrality of the diasporic and genocidal histories of Africa and the Americas, North and South, in the creation of the culture of modernity” (236). The Reader as a whole lays claim, pace Roach, to the critical value of specifically Anglo-American literary study. By including such dissenting voices, the editors position the transatlantic within a broad and intellectually capacious critical field. In the words of Manning and Taylor, “[Wai Chee] Dimock’s assertion that ‘neither a single nation nor a single race can yield an adequate frame for literary history’ is one of the working assumptions on which this Reader proceeds” (7).