Lance Newman, Joel Pace, and Chris Koenig-Woodyard, eds. Transatlantic Romanticism: An Anthology of British, American, and Canadian Literature 1767–1867. New York: Longman, 2006. 1344 pp. ISBN 0-321-21712-8 (paper). £33.99 (UK), $68.90 (USA).

Reviewed by Lyra Plumer, Princeton University

The capacious title of Transatlantic Romanticism: an Anthology of British, American, and Canadian Literature 1767–1867 reflects the challenges its editors faced in developing a ‘teachable textbook’ (xx) that would both dramatically widen the scope of the period we call ‘Romantic’ and render a whole century of frenetic international literary output accessible in the college classroom. The developing field of transatlantic studies inevitably contends with selection: which nations, which cultures and literatures to link over the Atlantic Ocean and which to leave out? The multiple and debatable axes of selection not only define the challenge of transatlantic literary studies but also propel its continued evolution. The Romantic period on both sides of the Atlantic is exceptionally rich in textual history—it is hard enough to fit British Romanticism between anthology covers, when politicians and reformers rivaled poets in literary merit, the novel rose, the epic poem was reborn. What happens when another continent’s-worth of urgent, important text is piled on?

The editors and publishers of the Longman anthology take up this transatlantic over-abundance with elegance and energy, and the result powerfully shows that for students of the North American and British eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, national borders just don’t make sense. Transatlantic Romanticism is the first teaching anthology that organizes and presents Anglo-American texts in a way that is designed specifically to draw out transatlantic connections and influences. The editors concede the daunting border-questions that characterize their project—why not America and France? America and Germany? Spain and the Caribbean? etc.—and acknowledge that their choices of nation and century are ‘heuristic,’ designed to provide a ‘wider than usual, but necessarily still limited, focus … a representative sample of that greater, perhaps infinite, complexity … a starting point for investigation’ (14). This anthology refuses to be overwhelmed by the vast scope of its subject-matter. Instead, it broadcasts the fact that transatlanticism is an extraordinarily powerful pedagogical tool at present precisely because of its immense suggestiveness. Students simply are not accustomed to studying British and American literatures together and when they do, it feels fresh, exciting, and productive. The American undergraduates that I teach, for example, were genuinely thrilled to use Wordsworth’s description of poetry as ‘the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings … recollected in tranquillity’ as a way of framing Frederick Douglass’s concern about whether or not an author could succeed in meaningfully representing the atrocities of slavery in writing. Transatlantic study gives a deep new relevance to both sides of the Atlantic and students quickly sense this revivifying energy.

Transatlantic Romanticism is arranged under three rubrics: standard chronology is enlivened by inter-author ‘exchanges’ and ‘responses.’ Selections are organized by birth date, from Ben Franklin to Emily Dickinson, and without national segregation. This makes for some surprising and provocative bedfellows: Susanna Rowson follows Wollstonecraft directly, Burke and Crevecoeur are separated only by Oliver Goldsmith, and Irving, Byron, and James Fenimore Cooper nestle together in a row. Interspersed throughout are seven themed sections termed ‘Transatlantic Exchanges.’ These provide brief selections from various authors on a topic or debate of particularly fraught international interest: ‘Revolutionary Republicanism’, ‘Slavery and Abolition’, ‘Women’s Rights’, ‘Wordsworth in Britain and America’, ‘Religion and Revivalism’, ‘Utopianism and Socialism’ and ‘Civilization and Nature’. Each unit has an introduction to explain and historically contextualize the issue, and they are placed strategically to complicate and broaden the primary author selections (‘Utopianism and Socialism’, for example, comes after the units on Percy Shelley, Felicia Hemans, William Cullen Bryant and Thomas Carlyle). The ‘exchange’ sections are notable, too, for including many now-peripheral but key authors like Joel Barlow and Elizabeth Palmer Peabody.

A third rubric, complementing the author units and ‘exchange’ clusters, produces seven ‘Contemporary Responses’ (a formation pioneered by the Longman anthologies), showcasing transatlantic authors’ interest in one another’s work. We find little-known letters, reviews, and other forms of response, ranging from a poetic reply to Oliver Goldsmith’s ‘The Deserted Village’ from his Canadian grand-nephew (also named Oliver Goldsmith), to a fascinating flurry of letters to the editor sparked by Frederick Douglass’s complaint to the London Times upon being forced from his cabin into steerage on a transatlantic journey to avoid racially offending other passengers. The response sections are particularly effective in accomplishing the editors’ goal of ‘documenting the transmission of specific ideas and ideals, poetical and political’ across the ocean (xxii).

These chronological, thematic, and response paradigms may confuse normative formulations of the ‘table of contents,’ but they call attention to the fact that Transatlantic Romanticism is doing something vitally different. The arrangement of texts pointedly resists categorizations such as the English Romantic ‘Big Six’ or the ‘American Renaissance’ in order to make a particular claim for the transatlantic. Author headnotes ‘emphasize … transatlantic interests, influences, exchanges, and travels’ (xxii) and are especially rich with compelling transatlantic anecdotes, such as the story of Byron’s American admirer who, having sailed to Greece to fight with him, found Byron already dead and stole his helmet as a consolation prize (602). In future editions, however, the anthology might benefit from a more systematic inclusion of transatlantic publication and reception information as well as other salient history-of-the-book details. This would illustrate the shaping influence of transatlantic readerships on Romantic authorship and vice versa. As it is, the transatlantic context of each text’s publication and reception tends to be adequately but somewhat inconsistently presented.

Transatlantic Romanticism has a refreshing and ambitious timeline, encompassing all the typical cutoffs of the French and American Revolutions, the Civil War, and the passing of the English Reform Bill in its generous span of ’67–’67, sweeping from the Townshend Acts to the Confederation of the Canadian colonies and the purchase of Alaska. The broadness of this choice, however, is perhaps more than a one-volume anthology can handle: coverage of the mid-nineteenth century and particularly the Civil War (an international event which would reward its own ‘Transatlantic Exchanges’ section) is sparse.

The volume’s General Introduction begins with a quick-paced, thrilling Anglo-American exchange of ideas that coheres around the powerfully transatlantic-Romantic imagery of Niagara Falls (1–9). The scene opens with Margaret Fuller’s 1843 visit to the Falls, during which time she is reading Carlyle on social reform. From here, the narrative briefly digresses into a concise history of European radicalism and revolution from the 1790s up to Peterloo. Carlyle’s pessimism bemuses Fuller, who worries that America, industrializing and modernizing at breakneck speed, will catch England’s ‘social disorder’ (2). These reflections lead into an account of Charles Dickens’ revulsion by tourism at the Falls; he grumbles in American Notes about graffiti on Table Rock, which the editors humorously quote. Also here, though, are ‘pounding fourteen-syllable lines’ excerpted from Canadian poet John Breakenridge, who found Niagara deeply spiritually fulfilling (3). Fuller, we learn, was as bored and disenchanted as Dickens with the American Falls (in a nice touch, New England artist Frederic Edwin Church’s 1867 painting of them fills page 6)—but it was a different story when Fuller crossed the border and examined the falls on the Canadian/British side, in a panorama. From this vantage point she had an experience of euphoria, terror, and self-erasure that the editors connect to Burkeian and Kantian ideas of the sublime, but also to Fuller’s urgent desire to have meaningful spiritual and artistic experiences in her own country, which, she feared, ‘lacked a deep human history’ (4). Ironically, we are reminded, the wild rushing of the Falls also represents the ‘dizzying pace of political and economic modernization’ and the dangers of radical social change to the conservative Carlyle (8).

This account of the transatlantic Falls, joining nature, politics, and poetry, then pivots to a passage from ‘Tintern Abbey’ that demonstrates the Romantic belief that ‘sublime nature can transform selves degraded by modernity’ (8), and the section ends with Percy Shelley’s claim that visionary poets are ‘unacknowledged legislators,’ re-emphasizing the take-home point that poets and writers of the Romantic century sought ‘experiences of the sublime … not just for their own sake but also as badges … of spiritual fitness to write the kind of literature that could redeem a society wracked by poverty, oppression, and violence’ (9). Their insistent return to the issue of reform reflects the editors’ commitment to historical and political contextualization, to showing that ‘even seemingly apolitical literary texts responded, if sometimes obliquely, to the period’s rich international atmosphere of idealism and dissent’ (xxi).

Although this exhilarating opening act might have filled out its American side with a word from Emerson, Thoreau, or Charles Brockden Brown, its investment in representing the geographic as well as ideological breadth of Romantic thought is impressive. What I missed, however, is a sustained focus on the idea of the transatlantic as such, on the ‘trans’ itself. As it is, the anthology might more aptly be called ‘Bicoastal Romanticism’ or ‘Anglo-American Romanticism.’ It would benefit from more material that prompts students to think not only about the way that ideas, issues, and images were mutated and complicated as they crossed and re-crossed the ocean, but also about the fact that the crossing and the idea of the crossing were vastly influential to the literature and culture of the period. The Anglo-American world and its literatures were shaped by the presence of the transatlantic divide, that ‘overwhelming, compounded, agent and image of defamiliarization—that endlessly re-invented and metaphorized sea-change, translation reified,’ as Susan Manning puts it in her essay in Joel Pace and Matthew Scott’s collection Wordsworth in American Literary Culture (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).

The Niagara Falls section feels like an ideal space for introducing this subject since the powerful attraction of the Falls for so many transatlantic writers is, in its very essence, a kind of concentrated Atlantic, a body of water between British and American territory that one can actually see across, whose image encompasses all the wonder, strangeness, and violence of the ocean crossing. The transatlantic imaginary played a profound role in the way that Anglo-American Romantic writers—living that infinitely complicated, simultaneous cultural link and divide—approached the basic literary problems of communication, transmission, and the navigation of different types of space.

Future editions might include more travel writing: more of the delightful and too little read American Notes, or some passages from Hawthorne’s Liverpool journals. There could also be more fictional representations of the ocean-crossing and transatlantic characters: the passage in Wollstonecraft’s Maria in which the dubious Darnforth figures America as a strange school of debauchery, or Charlotte Smith’s Old Manor House, in which the English hero goes off to fight in the American Revolution and gets captured by Indians, with whom he finds himself quickly sympathizing. The editors mention their hesitancy to excerpt novels, though they have well-chosen selections from Susanna Rowson, James Fenimore Cooper and Catharine Maria Sedgewick. But the hesitation is not necessary. No anthologist passes over excerpting long narrative poetry. So why not find a way to bring in Charles Brockden Brown’s uniquely transatlantic corpus (which influenced and entertained the Shelley circle), perhaps his short story ‘Somnambulism’? This reader would also welcome a selection from Harriet Beecher Stowe, the most transatlantically popular American novelist of the century.

Transatlantic Romanticism, like all literary anthologies, provokes intense curiosity about what is not in it and why, but here this is more a sign of its promise than its shortcomings. Transatlantic Romanticism has accomplished something extraordinary in giving a vital emerging field its first careful, comprehensive, accessible teaching tool. The editors and publishers are to be congratulated for their inspiring, groundbreaking work.

© Symbiosis, 2009