Crossings In Nineteenth Century American Culture

A state of the field essay collection that offers new models for analysing time, space, self and politics in nineteenth-century American culture

This volume addresses the political contexts in which nineteenth-century American literature was conceived, consumed, and criticized. It shows how a variety of literary genres and forms, such as poetry, drama, fiction, oratory, and nonfiction, engaged with political questions and participated in political debate.

Crossing Cultures brings together scholars in the field of reception and translation studies to chart the individual and institutional agencies that determined the reception of Anglophone authors in the Dutch and Belgian literary fields in the course of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century. The essays offer a variety of angles from which nineteenth-century literary dynamics in the Low Countries can be studied. The first two parts discuss the reception of Anglophone literature in the Netherlands and Belgium, respectively, while the third part focuses exclusively on the Dutch translation of women writers.

Since Crossing Sidelines, Crossing Cultures was originally published in 2000, new findings in Asian Pacific American sports have come to light. Moreover, Americans of Asian Pacific ancestry have made the sports world incredibly more exciting than before. Crossing Sidelines, Crossing Cultures tells intriguing tales of athletes, now often forgotten-such as aquatic legend Duke Kahanamoku, diving gold medalist Vicki Manalo, courageous female golfer Jackie Liwai Pung, and baseball pioneer Buck Lai. It explores how Asian Pacific Americans have asserted a vibrant, joyful sense of community through sports, while encountering racism and nativism. Since 2000, talented athletes of Asian Pacific ancestry have emerged-athletes such as the great Tiger Woods, but also Tim Lincicum, Troy Polamalu, Bryan Clay, Natasha Kai, and Logan Tom. These athletes have chipped away at prevailing stereotypes, and their stories, too, will be told in this second edition of Crossing Sidelines, Crossing Cultures.

Crossing the Line examines a group of early nineteenth-century novels by white creoles, writers whose identities and perspectives were shaped by their experiences in Britain’s Caribbean colonies. Colonial subjects residing in the West Indian colonies "beyond the line," these writers were perceived by their metropolitan contemporaries as far removed—geographically and morally—from Britain and "true" Britons. Routinely portrayed as single-minded in their pursuit of money and irredeemably corrupted by their investment in slavery, white creoles faced a considerable challenge in showing they were driven by more than a desire for power and profit. Crossing the Line explores the integral role early creole novels played in this cultural labor. The emancipation-era novels that anchor this study of Britain's Caribbean colonies question categories of genre, historiography, politics, class, race, and identity. Revealing the contradictions embedded in the texts’ constructions of the Caribbean "realities" they seek to dramatize, Candace Ward shows how these white creole authors gave birth to characters and enlivened settings and situations in ways that shed light on the many sociopolitical fictions that shaped life in the anglophone Atlantic.

Essays presented at a conference held in Madison, Wis., in April 2009 during observances of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the founding of Max Kade Institute for German-American Studies at University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Drawing examples from over 200 English-language and Spanish-language newspapers and periodicals published between January 1855 and October 1901, Paratextuality in Anglophone and Hispanophone Poems in the US Press, 1855-1901 argues that nineteenth-century newspaper poems are inherently paratextual. The paratextual situation of many newspaper poems (their links to surrounding textual items and discourses), their editorialisation through circulation (the way poems were altered from newspaper to newspaper) and their association and disassociation with certain celebrity bylines, editors and newspaper titles enabled contemporaneous poetic value and taste that, in the mid- to late-nineteenth century, were not only sentimental, Romantic and/or genteel. In addition to these important categories for determining a good and bad poem, poetic taste and value were determined, Bonifacio argues, via arbitrary consequences of circulation, paratextualisation, typesetter error and editorial convenience.

The character of the Creole woman—the descendant of settlers or slaves brought up on the colonial frontier—is a familiar one in nineteenth-century French, British, and American literature. In Creole Crossings, Carolyn Vellenga Berman examines the use of this recurring figure in such canonical novels as Jane Eyre, Uncle Tom's Cabin, and Indiana, as well as in the antislavery discourse of the period. "Creole" in its etymological sense means "brought up domestically," and Berman shows how the campaign to reform slavery in the colonies converged with literary depictions of family life. Illuminating a literary genealogy that crosses political, familial, and linguistic lines, Creole Crossings reveals how racial, sexual, and moral boundaries continually shifted as the century's writers reflected on the realities of slavery, empire, and the home front. Berman offers compelling readings of the "domestic fiction" of Honoré de Balzac, Charlotte Brontë, Maria Edgeworth, Harriet Jacobs, George Sand, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and others, alongside travel narratives, parliamentary reports, medical texts, journalism, and encyclopedias. Focusing on a neglected social classification in both fiction and nonfiction, Creole Crossings establishes the crucial importance of the Creole character as a marker of sexual norms and national belonging.