Books in the Edinburgh Studies in Transatlantic Literatures series

This study takes as its point of departure an essential premise: that the widespread phenomenon of expatriation in American modernism is less a flight from the homeland than a dialectical return to it, but one which renders uncanny all tropes of familiarity and immediacy which 'fatherlands' and 'mother tongues' are traditionally seen as providing. In this framework, similarly totalising notions of cultural authenticity are seen to govern both exoticist mystification and 'nativist' obsessions with the purity of the 'mother tongue.' At the same time, cosmopolitanism, translation, and multilingualism become often eroticised tropes of violation of this model, and in consequence, simultaneously courted and abhorred, in a movement which, if crystallised in expatriate modernism, continued to make its presence felt beyond.Beginning with the late work of Henry James, this book goes on to examine at length Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein, to conclude with the uncanny regionalism of mid-century San Francisco Renaissance poet Jack Spicer, and the deterritorialised aesthetic of Spicer's peer, John Ashbery. Through an emphasis on modernism as a space of generalized interference, the practice and trope of translation emerges as central to all of the writers concerned, while the book remains in constant dialogue with key recent works on transnationalism, transatlanticism, and modernism.

This book, the first fully sustained reading of Henry James's and Oscar Wilde's relationship, reveals why the antagonisms between both authors are symptomatic of the cultural oppositions within Aestheticism itself. The book also shows how these conflicting energies animated the late nineteenth century's most exciting transatlantic cultural enterprise. Richly illustrated and historically detailed, this study of James's and Wilde's intricate, decades-long relationship brings to light Aestheticism's truly transatlantic nature through close readings of both authors' works, as well as nineteenth-century art, periodicals and rare manuscripts. As Mendelssohn shows, both authors were deeply influenced by the visual and decorative arts, and by contemporary artists such as George Du Maurier and James McNeill Whistler. Henry James, Oscar Wilde and Aesthetic Culture offers a nuanced reading of a complex relationship that promises to transform the way in which we imagine late nineteenth-century British and American literary culture.

This book identifies and interprets the longstanding, transatlantic dialogue between the literary imaginations of Anglo-Ireland and the Anglo-American South.

A rediscovery of the bold cosmopolitan activism and professional literary adventures of six antebellum writers By looking beyond the page and into the extraordinary lives of Walt Whitman, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Grace Greenwood, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller and Frederick Douglass, this book uncovers their startling contributions to transatlantic culture and makes the argument that literature is dependent upon other modes of professional creativity in order to thrive. Leslie Elizabeth Eckel shows how these six figures shaped their careers in the fields of education, journalism, public lecturing and editing in productive relation to their development as imaginative writers. To see Walt Whitman co-producing foreign editions of his work with British poets while exuberantly breaking free from verse strictures on the page, or to witness Margaret Fuller reporting from the battle ground in revolutionary Rome as well as writing her country's first feminist treatise is to comprehend more deeply the ways in which these writers acted in the transatlantic sphere. By practicing Atlantic citizenship, they were able to achieve critical distance from the United States and, paradoxically, to catalyse its ongoing growth.

Longlisted for the Wales Book of the Year 2007 Writing in 1903, W. E. B. Du Bois suggested that the goal for the African-American was 'to be a co-worker in the kingdom of culture'.He was evoking 'culture' as a solution to the divisions within society, thereby adopting, in a very different context, an idea that had been influentially expressed by Matthew Arnold in the 1860s. Du Bois questioned the assumed universality of this concept by asking who, ultimately, is allowed into the 'kingdom of culture'? How does one come to speak from a position of cultural authority?This book adopts a transatlantic approach to explore these questions. It centres on four Victorian 'men of letters' "e; Matthew Arnold, William Dean Howells, W. B. Yeats and W. E. B. Du Bois "e; who drew on notions of ethnicity as a basis from which to assert their cultural authority. In comparative close readings of these figures Daniel Williams addresses several key areas of contemporary literary and cultural debate. The book questions the notion of 'the West' as it appears and re-appears in the formulations of postcolonial theory, challenges the widespread tendency to divide nationalism into 'civic' and 'ethnic' forms, and forces its readers to reconsider what they mean when they talk about 'culture', 'identity' and 'national literature'. Key Features*Offers a substantial, innovative intervention in transatlantic debates over race and ethnicity*Uses 4 intriguing authors to explore issues of national identity, racial purity and the use of literature as a marker of 'cultural capital'*A unique focus on Celtic identity in a transatlantic context*Sets up a dialogue between writers who believe in national identity and those who believe in cultural distinctiveness

A major interpretation of recent South Asian diasporic writing and cinema in specifically transatlantic terms Ruth Maxey provides readings of canonical and less well-known South Asian American and British Asian texts and key cinematic works. She explores the formal and thematic tendencies of the works, relating them to gender politics, the marketplace, and issues of literary value and historical change. While engaging with established debates, Maxey also intervenes in new ways in transatlantic, postcolonial literary, and Asian American cultural studies. Key features * Looks at writers including Jhumpa Lahiri, Bharati Mukherjee, Mohsin Hamid, Hanif Kureishi, Monica Ali, and Nadeem Aslam * Explores films such as Mischief Night, Mississippi Masala, A Love Supreme, and Praying with Anger * Sources used include articles from mainstream American, Asian and British newspapers such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Hindu, New Statesman, The Daily Telegraph, and The Guardian * Engages with critics including Susan Koshy, Sukhdev Sandhu, Rajini Srikanth, and James Procter * The book is organised around the four key themes of: home & nation, travel & return, racial mixing, and food & eating.