Transnationalism’s Territories: The Nation, the World, and the New American Literary History

Abstract

Over the course of the past decade, the boundaries of “American” literature have been redrawn by scholars who have taught us to see powerful networks of literary influence and engagement across continents and cultures. Leslie Elizabeth Eckel’s Atlantic Citizens: Nineteenth-Century American Writers at Work in the World and Tom F. Wright’s edited collection The Cosmopolitan Lyceum: Lecture Culture and the Globe in Nineteenth-Century America pair beautifully because both volumes approach this wider geography by keeping their own topics quite narrow. In these books, we find a methodology for transnational scholarship that does not attempt to comprehend vast reaches of space and time (an approach modeled by Wai Chee Dimock’s Through Other Continents: American Literature Across Deep Time [2006]) or to engage cultural pluralism as an everyday experience (an approach modeled by Lawrence Rosenwald’s Multilingual America: Language and the Making of American Literature [2008]). Instead, Eckel and Wright focus on discrete, delimited times and places wherein the cosmopolitan forces of American culture can be critically interrogated.