Atlantic Citizens
Nineteenth-Century American Writers at Work in the World
Published on 18. February 2013
Book
Hardback
248 pages
978-0-7486-6937-0 (ISBN)
Description
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.
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.
More details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
Edinburgh
United Kingdom
Target group
College/higher education
Product notice
sewn/stitched
Cloth over boards
Dimensions
Height: 241 mm
Width: 159 mm
Thickness: 25 mm
Weight
524 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-7486-6937-0 (9780748669370)
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Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions
E-Book
02/2013
1st Edition
Edinburgh University Press
€0.00
Available for download
Person
Leslie Elizabeth Eckel is Associate Professor of English at Suffolk University in Boston. She is the author of Atlantic Citizens: Nineteenth-Century American Writers at Work in the World (2013). Her essays have appeared in books and journals such as Atlantic Studies, Transatlantica, Common-place, Arizona Quarterly, and ESQ. Her current book project, "Dwelling in Possibility: Atlantic Utopias and Countercultures," explores the linguistic networks of utopian writing in the long nineteenth century.
Content
Acknowledgements; Introduction: The Vocational Routes of American Literature; 1. Longfellow and the Volume of the World; 2. Fuller's Conversational Journalism: New York, London, Rome; 3. 'A type of his countrymen': Douglass and Transatlantic Print Culture; 4. Between Cosmos and Cosmopolis: Emerson's National Criticism; 5. The Professional Pilgrim: Greenwood Sells the Transatlantic Experience; 6. Standing Upon America: Whitman and the Profession of National Poetry; Afterword: Vocation or Vacation? Transatlantic Professionalism Now; Bibliography; Index.