Full Description
This book is about Anglo-American literary heritage. It argues that readers on both sides of the Atlantic shaped the contours of international 'English' in the 1800s, expressing love for books and authors in a wide range of media and social practices. It highlights how, in the wake of American independence, the affection bestowed on authors who became international objects of celebration and commemoration was a major force in the invention of transnational 'English' literature, the popular canon defined by shared language and tradition. While love as such is difficult to quantify and recover, the records of such affection survive not just in print, but also in other media: in monuments, in architecture, and in the ephemera of material culture. Thus, this collection brings into view a wide range of nineteenth-century expressions of love for literature and its creators.
Contents
Introduction: Reading, Reception, and the Rise of Transatlantic 'English'; Ann Wierda Rowland and Paul Westover.- 1. American Idiom: Sara Hale's Flora's Interpreter and the Figuration of National Identity; Kelli Towers Jasper.- 2. Bentley's Standard Novelist: James Fenimore Cooper; Joseph Rezek.- 3. 'The American Tennyson' and 'The English Longfellow': Inverted Audiences and Popular Poetry; Sharon Estes.- 4. The Americans in the English Men of Letters; Ryan Stuart Lowe.- 5. 'The Author Makes the Reader Acquainted with His Abode': Hawthorne as Transatlantic Tour Guide in The Marble Faun and 'The Old Manse'; Charles Baraw.- 6. The Transatlantic Home Network: Discovering Sir Walter Scott in American Authors' Houses; Paul Westover.- 7. Wordsworthshire and Thoreau Country: Transatlantic Landscapes of Genius; Scott Hess.- 8. Helen A. Clarke and Charlotte Endymion Porter: Literary Criticism in Author Country a Century Ago; Alison Booth.- 9. Transatlantic Reception and Commemoration of the 'Poet of the Scotch', Robert Burns; Christopher A. Whatley.- 10. Loving, Knowing, and Illustrating Keats: the Louis Arthur Holman Collection of Keats Iconography; Ann Wierda Rowland.- 11. The Unofficial Force": Irregular Author Love and the Higher Criticism; Charles J. Rzepka.- Index.
