Transatlantic Intellectual Networks 1914 1964

The twelve essays in this book – by scholars from the U.S., France, Germany, the Netherlands and the Czech Republic – offer new transnational perspectives in transatlantic historical, literary, and cultural studies. They explore the special role of American and European intellectuals as agents of transatlantic cultural transfer, and examine the mechanisms and instruments through which artists, writers and intellectuals communicated across oceans and national borders, in the half century between 1914 and 1964. Their focus is on transatlantic networks and the instruments of culture through which such networks become operative as sites of cross-cultural exchange, circulation and interaction: magazines, cafés, publishing houses, book fairs, agents, translators, and mediators – and last but not least, transatlantic personal friendships. Contending that the dynamics of transatlantic cultural transfer need to be understood as reciprocal and multi-directional, they also exemplify the shift within transatlantic intellectual history from a traditional concern with European-U.S. relations to a multidirectional, triangular exploration of cultural, political and intellectual relations between Europe, the United States, and Latin America.

Thematically and structurally, the work of the Kittitian-British writer Caryl Phillips reimagines the notion of genealogy. Phillips’s fiction, drama, and non-fiction foreground broken filiations and forever-deferred promises of new affiliations in the aftermath of slavery and colonization. His texts are also in dialogue with multiple historical figures and literary influences, imagining around the life of the African American comedian Bert Williams and the Caribbean writer Jean Rhys, or retelling the story of Othello. Additionally, Phillips’s work resonates with that of other writers and visual artists, such as Derek Walcott, Toni Morrison, or Isaac Julien. Written to honor the career of renown Phillipsian scholar Bénédicte Ledent, the contributions to this volume, including one by Phillips himself, explore the multiple ramifications of genealogy, across and beyond Phillips’s work.

Adopting a unique historical approach to its subject and with a particular focus on the institutions involved in the creation, dissemination, and reception of literature, this handbook surveys the way in which the Cold War shaped literature and literary production, and how literature affected the course of the Cold War. To do so, in addition to more 'traditional' sources it uses institutions like MFA programs, university literature departments, book-review sections of newspapers, publishing houses, non-governmental cultural agencies, libraries, and literary magazines as a way to understand works of the period differently. Broad in both their geographical range and the range of writers they cover, the book's essays examine works of mainstream American literary fiction from writers such as Roth, Updike and Faulkner, as well as moving beyond the U.S. and the U.K. to detail how writers and readers from countries including, but not limited to, Taiwan, Japan, Uganda, South Africa, India, Cuba, the USSR, and the Czech Republic engaged with and contributed to Anglo-American literary texts and institutions.

This study seeks to fill a major gap in the fields of Nineteenth-Century American and British Studies by examining how nineteenth-century intellectuals shaped and re-shaped aesthetic traditions across the Atlantic Ocean. Special attention is paid to a group of salient cultural concepts, such as artist-as-hero, imagination, the picturesque, reform, simultaneity, and seriality. Although embedded in a particular aesthetic tradition, these concepts travel from one culture to another and are transformed along their transatlantic journeys. The purpose of this book is to explore the roles of these ‘traveling concepts’ within the realm of transatlantic cultures and to trace their at times surprising paths within ever-widening transnational intellectual networks.

The transatlantic world has had immense influence on the direction of world history. The six illuminating studies in Transatlantic History address cultural exchanges and intercontinental developments that contribute to our modern understanding of global communities. Transatlantic history encompasses a variety of scholarly problems and approaches from multiple disciplines, and volume editors Steven G. Reinhardt and Dennis P. Reinhartz have assembled a collection of essays that reflect the diversity within the field. Introducing the book, William McNeill provides a unifying overview of the concept and practice of transatlantic history by placing it within the larger context of world history. The chapter authors bring distinctive styles and methods to the investigation of the processes of interaction and adaptation among Africans, Native Americans, and Europeans. Their studies range from the Spanish imperial crisis in the 1600s to the urbanization of Europe and the Americas, from graphic portrayals of the Atlantic world to the settlement of Ireland, America, and South Africa and the recent diaspora of West Africans. Readers interested in world history, communication, and cultural studies will find Transatlantic History provocative and challenging as it convincingly argues for the importance of this new field.

Beginning in the late 1950s, an influential cadre of young, white, mostly middle-class British men were consuming and appropriating African-American blues music, using blues tropes in their own music and creating a network of admirers and emulators that spanned the Atlantic. This cross-fertilization helped create a commercially successful rock idiom that gave rise to some of the most famous British groups of the era, including The Rolling Stones, The Yardbirds, Eric Clapton, and Led Zeppelin. What empowered these white, middle-class British men to identify with and claim aspects of the musical idiom of African-American blues musicians? The British Blues Network examines the role of British narratives of masculinity and power in the postwar era of decolonization and national decline that contributed to the creation of this network, and how its members used the tropes, vocabulary, and mythology of African-American blues traditions to forge their own musical identities.

This book covers the evolution of royal policy in Spanish America as eighteenth-century Spain modernized its empire and transformed itself into a power of the first order. Tracing the interplay between war and reform, the analysis confronts the diverse realities of the Spanish Atlantic world, which stretched from the northern Mexican borderlands to Argentina and Chile. Unlike earlier studies on eighteenth-century Spain, this work incorporates the early Bourbon experience into the narrative and integrates the impressive reemergence of the Royal Armada into a fuller picture of administrative, commercial, fiscal, ecclesiastical, and military change.

Arthur Tappan Pierson (1837 1911) was the elder statesman of the student missionary movement and the leading evangelical advocate of foreign missions in the late 1800s. Occupy until I Come, the first biography of Pierson in more than a century, explores the life, thought, and legacy of this major figure in American religious history. Working from the best available sources, Dana Robert illumines the relationship between A. T. Pierson's role in the surging foreign missions movement and the development of nineteenth-century evangelicalism. Pierson was famous in his day as a Bible teacher, a leader in Keswick holiness piety, and an urban pastor who cared passionately for the poor. An original editor of the Scofield Reference Bible, Pierson also carried on a transatlantic preaching ministry that made him famous in Scotland and England. In covering both Pierson's career and his context, this book is not only the finest available biography of A. T. Pierson but also a valuable portrait of America's religious landscape at a key point in history.