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Lance
Newman, "Introduction: A History of Transatlantic
Romanticism."
Newman argues that Romanticism was a
definitively international cultural movement, and that most
literary scholarship examining the period has been deformed
by rigid disciplinary boundaries that follow national
borders. Nevertheless, a critical assessment of
transatlantic Romanticism as national agon was established
by Harold Bloom and others, beginning in the 1970s. A
second wave of scholars, including Stephen Fender, Paul
Gilroy, and Richard Brantley, reversed this assessment in
the 1990s, emphasizing instead the absolute
transnationalism of literary production during the period.
Finally a third wave, including Richard Gravil and Paul
Giles, has emerged that synthesizes the strengths of its
predecessors, setting a new standard for empirical cultural
analysis that is freed of nationalist distortions but
closely attentive to the power of nationalism as one of the
most fundamental structures of identity during the Romantic
century. The essays in Sullen Fires Across the
Atlantic have moved beyond the simple notation of
literary influence or ideological parallelism to perform a
functional taxonomy of transatlantic Romanticism. Taken
together, they help explain why the movement developed at
different times and rates in different places around the
Atlantic. Romanticism was a complex and multivalent
response to, and articulation of, the combined and uneven
rise of capitalist social relations. The first two sets of
essays focus on literary nationalism and gender and
nationalism. The third explores the rich cultural history
of literary exchange between England and Latin America,
pointing out new directions for the field.
[go to
introduction]
Joselyn Almeida,
"London-Kingston-Caracas: The Transatlantic Self-Fashioning
of Simón Bolívar."
Joselyn Almeida argues that "the Spanish
American nexus that connected London, Kingston, and even
Dublin with Spain, the Caribbean, South America, and Africa
has been largely overlooked." She sets out to demonstrate
the workings of this nexus by reconstructing Simón
Bolívar's tremendously complex and canny
self-fashioning for British and South American participants
in London's multilingual magazine culture. Alternative
versions of a biographical sketch of Bolívar
appeared in the January 1823 numbers of the New Monthly
Magazine and Variedades. Both articles were vetted by
José Blanco White, but the second acknowledges
Bolívar's 1810 visit to London, while the first
suppresses this image of the great liberator's political
ties to imperial Britain. Similarly, Bolívar's
"Jamaica Letter," written in Kingston in 1815 and published
in The Jamaica Quarterly and Literary
Gazette in 1818, "aims to create a textual alliance
between Britain and Latin America" and "uses the language
of abolition as a critique of empire to gain sympathy for
the Latin American cause." In short, Almeida demonstrates
that transatlantic Romanticism will not have been fully
constituted as a field until we recognize that because
"intercultural exchanges cross linguistic borders" as
easily as geographic ones, we cannot "invoke the Americas,
the Caribbean, and the Atlantic, and ignore the crucial
presence of Hispano-Americans, whom Romantic authors
themselves acknowledged."
[go to
essay]
Jen
Camden, "'Do you forget Louisa?': Forotten Heroines and
the Marriage Plot in Radcliffe, Austen, and Cooper."
In this essay, Jen Camden locates the
erasure and then the return of secondary heroines, such as
Louisa Grant in James Fenimore Cooper's The
Pioneers, as part of a larger narrative pattern of
forgetting in the nineteenth-century novel. Specifically,
she examines Ann Radcliffe's A Sicilian Romance
(1790), Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility
(1811), and The Pioneers to argue that each novel
“forgets” a heroine, only to have her return at
the end in a puzzling and uncanny “return of the
repressed.” Rather than understanding this return in
psychoanalytic terms, however, she examines these heroines
in terms of competing ideals of national identity and
femininity. Specifically, she shows that the primary
heroines in these novels represent a socially-visible
“sensibility” that represses the more invisible
“sense” represented by the secondary heroines.
In turn, these novels evoke readers' sensibilities, either
to enforce or, in the case of Austen, to question the role
of sensibility in shaping the national identities of
England and America through literary heroines. In this way,
she demonstrates that the transatlantic transmission of the
figure of the forgotten heroine is illustrative of the
cultural work performed by the novel as a genre in both
England and America.
[go to
essay]
Andre
Cardoso, "Children Playing by the Sea: The Dynamics of
Appropriation in the Brazilian Romantic Novel."
Although the nineteenth-century romantic
novel in Brazil is intensely concerned with the creation of
a national identity, this has little to do with the
reproduction of a local reality. The early Brazilian novel
seems rather to build a national identity through its
relationship with novelistic models imported from Europe.
This appropriation, however, is highly selective and avoids
the dogmatic adoption of any given model: it is rather
based on the freeplay among different models in a kind of
game in which none of them is supposed to be taken
seriously. In this game, the Brazilian nation is
seen—or rather imagined—as an in-between place
characterized by indefinition. At the same time, the
analysis of two primordial Brazilian novels, Joaquim Manuel
de Macedo's A Moreninha and José de
Alencar's Lucíola, shows that this
in-between space is connected to the indefinition of a
paradisiacal place of origin and to the innocence of
childhood, which appear as two essential values in the way
the Brazilian nation is imagined in its formative stages by
its writers.
[go to
essay]
James
Crane, "Love and Merit in Maritime Historical
Novels."
In British and American maritime novels,
commanding seafaring figures illustrate the ways that
Romantic-era writers understood the links among manliness,
feeling, and political organization. Friendship, in
particular, provides an effective metaphor for both the
organizing power of heroic individuals and the patriotic
bonds that unify citizens. This essay compares the
relationships among sailors in Walter Scott's novel The
Pirate (1821) to the instances of intimate friendship
among heroes in The Pilot: A Tale of the Sea
(1823) by James Fenimore Cooper. In Scott's romance, piracy
and democracy isolate worthy men from the histories and
national traditions that make individual enterprise
meaningful. Cooper responds to this conflation of democracy
with piracy by imagining that, in the Revolutionary-era US
Navy, the natural feelings of men in groups produce a
smoothly-functioning meritocracy. Through scenarios that
dramatize how republican men among men will faithfully
recognize the merit of one another because—as good
citizens—they love each other so much, in The
Pilot Cooper stages the improving effects of US social
relations upon institutions inherited from Britain. Both
writers stress the relationship between manliness and
meritocracy, but only Cooper trusts that the innate appeal
of American white manhood will ensure the sustainability
and justice of democratic social relations.
[go to
essay]
Sarah
Ferguson-Wagstaffe, "Points of Contact: Blake and
Whitman."
This essay seeks to reopen a transatlantic
dialogue between Blake and Whitman, and illuminate a
material point of contact (Whitman's tomb)through a close
reading of these poets' rhetorical points of contact. The
author focuses on Blake's engraving, "Death's Door," which
served as a model for Whitman's tomb, Whitman's responses
to Blake in his letters and notes, their shared status as
prophetic poets, and their poetics of revision.
[go to
essay]
Scott Harshbarger, "National Demons:
Burns, Hawthorne, and the Folk in the Forest."
A comparison of Nathaniel Hawthorne's
"Young Goodman Brown" and Robert Burns's "Tam O'Shanter"
sheds light on the critical strategies the authors
developed in adapting folk materials in a milieu awash with
literary nationalism. Whereas literary nationalism is often
intended to celebrate the native glory of an exceptional
people, these works, drawing on the content and technique
of folk legend, reveal the flipside of that project,
illuminating the complex relationship between demons,
demonizers, and cultural nation-making. Whereas Burns seems
content to play with the dichotomies upon which the
Scottish nation might be constructed—his hero
comically impervious to any attempt to define a detestable
other—Hawthorne seems more worried by a project that
rests on such a strategy. The writers' attempt to forge
national worship through folk legend and belief is
considerably complicated, and subversively inspired, by the
strange and mournful tales of the folk themselves.
[go to essay]
Rebecca Cole Heinowitz, "The Allure of
the Same: Rober Southey's Welsh Indians and the Rhetoric of
Good Colonialism."
While scholars of the British nineteenth
century are already familiar with the rhetoric of otherness
that characterized the writing of the Victorian empire in
India and Africa, we are less accustomed to analyzing the
rhetoric of sameness that characterized Romantic-era
Britain's imperial interest in Spanish America. To begin to
address the figure of cross-cultural similitude in Romantic
British writing, this essay focuses on Robert Southey's
1805 poem Madoc, a Welsh-Mexican epic set in the twelfth
century. The investigation starts with Edmund Burke's
charges against Warren Hastings, the Governor General of
Bengal, and uses Burke's plea for benevolent colonialism in
India to understand the political context behind Madoc's
celebration of "good" imperialism in Spanish America. While
Southey's notion of benevolent imperialism worked to allay
anxieties aroused by Britain's increasingly aggressive
presence in Spanish America, however, the vision of natural
moral rectitude it conjured up was fraught with
contradictions. If the tacit agenda behind Madoc was to
imagine how the ancient Britons could have conquered and
colonized America more humanely than the Spanish, then the
process of imagining this reality revealed uncomfortable
similarities between sixteenth-century Spain and
Romantic-era England. Even while the lessons of the
Hastings trial weighed heavily on the British conscience,
Britain was forwarding a policy of indirect rule and
outright conquest in Spanish America. Madoc is thus as much
the document of Southey's anxious struggle to exalt
imperial protectionism as a unifier of conqueror and
conquered as it is a tale of how Prince Madoc conquered
Mexico, freed the native Hoamen from their Aztec tyrants,
and founded a colony of "Welsh Indians." Southey's
portrayal of "good" colonialism and Welsh-Mexican harmony
ultimately exceeds its own rhetoric, revealing terrible
violence on both sides, and requiring the annihilation of
Prince Madoc's American progeny in order to purge Britain
of its imperial guilt.
[go to
essay]
Sohui
Lee, "'An Anti-Democratic Habit of Feeling':The
Rhetoric of Toryism in O'Sullivan's Democratic
Review 1837-1846."
America's well-known quest for national
literature began, as Benjamin Spencer relates, with the new
republic's search for a surrogate British identity, making
the great problem of American literature a problem of
ontology—that is, a problem of being, as Poe
observes, “a literary colony of Great Britain”
(Poe 1044). For some nineteenth-century American thinkers,
the unavoidable consequence of their colonial relationship
with Britain was derivative literature: it was a question
whether American literature exists or could ever be
established. In this essay I'd like to offer another way of
thinking about antebellum literary nationalism and
America's obsession with literary independence by examining
nationalism in John Louis O'Sullivan's Democratic
Review, one of the most prestigious and influential
magazines of the period. By shifting the issue of
nationalism from writers and anxieties of aesthetic
independence to anxieties about readers and ideological
dependency, I hope to show how the Democratic
Review introduced a particular brand of democratic
personality and aesthetics which was reinforced by the
literature printed in its pages. Antebellum nationalism, as
it surfaced in Jacksonian rhetoric of the 1830s and early
1840s, acknowledged the aesthetic problem of originality
and dependency, but it also turned to a separate, though
related, critical concern: the popularity of British books
and its effect on American readers. A material study of
creative works in the Democratic Review alongside
the writings of its editor O'Sullivan reveal a nationalist
strategy that focused on combating British literary power
over Americans. For O'Sullivan, national literature doubly
counteracted British influence: by visualizing a morally
distinct American identity determined by affective ties
amongst its people and by fashioning a British Tory
identity dramatically opposed to the American Democrat's.
This essay explores O'Sullivan's vital contribution to
Jacksonian nationalism through the assembly of authors like
Hawthorne and a politicized literary charge that imagined
Britain as the moral and sympathetic antithesis to the
United States.
[go to
essay]
Cree LeFavour, "Vanity Fair and
the Logic of Anglo-American Sentimentality."
Vanity Fair's strong presence in
the American market invites the dissolution of the
monochromatic sentimentality that critics still too often
expect of American women's novels at mid-century. The
book's popularity provides an opportunity to examine what
crtics and, presumably readers, valued about novels and
why. LeFavour argues that Becky Sharp's "naturalness," and
her explicit rejection of books and female self-improvement
invite a reconconsideration of the naivite and simplicity
critics have often assumed in their discussions of American
domestic fiction. At the same time, debates over Becky's
unconventional femininity draws attention to the
contentious debates over the moral status of novels
themselves and the kind of cultural work they
performed.
[go
to essay]
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