Carlyle, Emerson and the Transatlantic Uses of Authority: Literature, Print, Performance

by Tim Sommer

Overview

Examining the transatlantic writings and professional careers of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, this book explores the impact of literary, cultural, political and legal manifestations of authority on nineteenth-century British and American writing, publishing and lecturing. Drawing on primary texts in conjunction with a rich body of archival sources, this study retraces Romantic debates about race and nationhood, analyses the relationship between cultural nationalism and literary historiography and sheds light on Carlyle’s and Emerson’s professional identities as publishing authors and lecturing celebrities on both sides of the Atlantic.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781474491952
Publisher:	Edinburgh University Press
Publication date:	07/17/2023
Series:	Interventions in Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Culture , #8
Pages:	280
Product dimensions:	6.14(w) x 9.21(h) x 0.59(d)

About the Author

Tim Sommer is a Lecturer and Postdoctoral Researcher at the English Department of the University of Heidelberg. He has held visiting appointments at Harvard Universityand at the University of Cambridge. His research has appeared or is forthcoming in journals such as Romanticism, Book History, The New England Quarterly and The Wordsworth Circle.

Table of Contents

AcknowledgementsAbbreviations

Introduction: Transatlantic Literary Culture and the Uses of Authority

Part I: Anglo-American Literary and Cultural Identities

1. Race and Nationhood in the Mid-Nineteenth-Century Transatlantic Field

2. Usable Pasts: Anglo-American Literature and the Authority of Tradition

Part II: Authority and Authorisation in the Anglo-American Print Market

3. ‘Transatlantic Bibliopoly’: Carlyle’s Early American Print Career

4. ‘A Yankee Pocket Edition of Carlyle’? Emerson on the British Market

Part III: Performing Nationhood on the Transatlantic Lecture Circuit

5. Touring Anglo-America: Emerson as Transatlantic Lecturer

6. (De-)Authorising Eloquence: Carlyle and Transatlantic Public Speech

Epilogue: From Sectional Conflict to Posthumous Consecration

BibliographyIndex

Editorial Reviews

Emerson and Carlyle were an odd couple and a transatlantic cultural powerhouse. Their decades-long exchange electrified literary circuits and jolted thinking about historiography, race, nationhood, copyright and lecturing, as Tim Sommer shows. This shrewd study of the nineteenth century’s alternating currents of cultural authority snaps and crackles with insights.

Michèle Mendelssohn