Sullen Fires Across the Atlantic:
Essays in Transatlantic Romanticism

Notes

¹ Marietta Messmer provides a thorough and compelling genealogy of literary historiographical nationalism in the US, and argues that it is time for the revisionist "intra-American cultural pluralism" of recent decades to be supplemented by studies of "America’s transnational or global interliterary and intercultural relations" (50).
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² For a preciously stuffy statement of the mid-century nationalist position, see Robert Hertz’s "English and American Romanticism" (1965), which notes that "we characterize the Romantics of the United States as men of affirmation, optimism, and healthy vision of the certain glory which lies a little beyond. By implication, the English Romantics are brilliant but effete aristocrats rather than men of the People or great souls of quiet meditation and discovery" (81). See Russell Reising, Gerald Graff, and David R. Shumway for general accounts of the nationalistic impulses behind the disciplinary formation of American Literature.
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³ Another influential summary statement of the common sense of old historicism is Tony Tanner’s essay, "Notes for a Comparison between American and European Romanticism" (1968), in one of the earliest issues of the journal of the British Association for American Studies. Tanner is mainly concerned to differentiate American practice from the known quantity of the European tradition. He observes that the Americans have an abiding sense of solitude in nature, a low regard for history, and, more surprisingly, that they do not have a "revolutionary social dimension," that is, an "energizing conviction that the poet’s imaginative visions...could vitally influence and enhance the conditions of life of their fellow men" (97).
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⁴ Linden Peach makes a systematic argument of this position in his British Influence on the Birth of American Literature (1982).
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⁵ Brantley expands his argument in Anglo-American Antiphony: The Late Romanticism of Tennyson and Emerson (1994) and in Experience and Faith : The Late-Romantic Imagination of Emily Dickinson (2005).
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⁶ Two important earlier studies of reciprocity in the formation of American and British national identity are Christopher Mulvey’s Anglo-American Landscapes (1983) and Transatlantic Manners (1990), both of which use travel narratives as their main body of evidence.
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⁷ Another way of complicating the easy tale of American Romanticism’s rebellion against Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, and Keats has been to demonstrate that Emerson, Thoreau, Fuller, and the rest were consciously indebted to wholly other forebears. See, for instance, Susan Manning’s two excellent studies of connections between Scottish and American literary cultures. Also see Robin Grey’s account of the importance of 17th-Century English culture to the major authors of the American Renaissance.
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⁸ See also Giles’s exploration of the term "transnational" along with his rereading of Emerson and Thoreau in the context of early national Anglophobia in "Transnationalism and Classic American Literature." An important complementary study of the way in which British nationalism developed as part of the rise of imperialism is Saree Makdisi’s Romantic Imperialism (1998), which rereads the central Romantic poets in the context of developments in India, Africa, and the Arab world.
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⁹ Several recent collections of essays have begun to explore the field mapped most thoroughly by Gravil. Comparative Romanticisms: Power, Gender, Subjectivity (1998), edited by Larry H. Peer and Diane Long Hoeveler provides twelve case studies of the true internationalism of the three analytical categories listed in the title. These essays make connections around the entire Atlantic Rim and beyond, with readings of American, British, German, French, Italian, and Russian texts. A second collection of essays from the discipline of comparative literature, this one focusing more narrowly on connections between the British, French, and German Romantics, is Gregory Maertz’s collection, Cultural Interactions in the Romantic Age (1998). Also important for its accounts of the internationalism of both natural history and republicanism and their literary consequences is Revolutions and Watersheds: Transatlantic Dialogues 1775-1815 (1999), edited by W. M. Verhoeven and Beth Kautz. More recently, Verhoeven has edited Revolutionary Histories: Transatlantic Cultural Nationalism, 1775-1815 (2002), an impressive volume centered on the Romantic keywords, "history" and "nation." Finally, the first half of Special Relationships: Anglo-American Affinities and Antagonisms, 1854-1936, edited by Janet Beer and Bridget Bennett offers a valuable selection of case studies in late Romanticism.
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¹⁰ See the two recent collections of essays in transatlantic studies edited by Will Kaufman and Heidi Slettedahl Macpherson for a sampling of the full range of concerns, outside the Romantic period, addressed by this new discipline.
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