Atlantic Citizens: Nineteenth-Century American Writers at Work in the World (Edinburgh Studies in Transatlantic Literatures) - Hardcover

Leslie Eckel

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 074866937X ISBN 13: 9780748669370

Publisher: Edinburgh University Press, 2013

Synopsis

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.

About this title

About the Author:

Leslie Eckel is Assistant Professor at the Suffolk University, Boston.

Review:

This book represent a fine contribution to transatlantic scholarship...Eckel's
way of recontextualizing authors according to their "vocational routes" offers
illuminating new readings of canonical American writers.
Paul Giles, Journal of American Studies, 48/1

Each chapter of Atlantic Citizens is deeply grounded in criticism,
history, biography and close textual analysis. Leslie Eckel's prose is largely
jargon free and sparkles with shrewd insights and delightful wit. Her book is a
bold declaration that transatlantic literary study is as vital as ever.
Emerson Society Papers, Vol 25, Number 1

About this edition

• Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 074866937X
• ISBN 13: 9780748669370
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 248