Transatlantic Literature And Author Love In The Nineteenth Century

This book is about Anglo-American literary heritage. It argues that readers on both sides of the Atlantic shaped the contours of international ‘English’ in the 1800s, expressing love for books and authors in a wide range of media and social practices. It highlights how, in the wake of American independence, the affection bestowed on authors who became international objects of celebration and commemoration was a major force in the invention of transnational ‘English’ literature, the popular canon defined by shared language and tradition. While love as such is difficult to quantify and recover, the records of such affection survive not just in print, but also in other media: in monuments, in architecture, and in the ephemera of material culture. Thus, this collection brings into view a wide range of nineteenth-century expressions of love for literature and its creators.

This book is about Anglo-American literary heritage. It argues that readers on both sides of the Atlantic shaped the contours of international 'English' in the 1800s, expressing love for books and authors in a wide range of media and social practices. It highlights how, in the wake of American independence, the affection bestowed on authors who became international objects of celebration and commemoration was a major force in the invention of transnational 'English' literature, the popular canon defined by shared language and tradition. While love as such is difficult to quantify and recover, the records of such affection survive not just in print, but also in other media: in monuments, in architecture, and in the ephemera of material culture. Thus, this collection brings into view a wide range of nineteenth-century expressions of love for literature and its creators.

In 1798, English essayist and novelist William Godwin ignited a transatlantic scandal with Memoirs of the Author of "A Vindication of the Rights of Woman." Most controversial were the details of the romantic liaisons of Godwin's wife, Mary Wollstonecraft, with both American Gilbert Imlay and Godwin himself. Wollstonecraft's life and writings became central to a continuing discussion about love's place in human society. Literary radicals argued that the cultivation of intense friendship could lead to the renovation of social and political institutions, whereas others maintained that these freethinkers were indulging their own desires with a disregard for stability and higher authority. Through correspondence and novels, Andrew Cayton finds an ideal lens to view authors, characters, and readers all debating love's power to alter men and women in the world around them. Cayton argues for Wollstonecraft's and Godwin's enduring influence on fiction published in Great Britain and the United States and explores Mary Godwin Shelley's endeavors to sustain her mother's faith in romantic love as an engine of social change.

The Author's Effects: On the Writer's House Museum is the first book to describe how the writer's house museum came into being as a widespread cultural phenomenon across Britain, Europe, and North America. Exploring the ways that authorship has been mythologised through the conventions of the writer's house museum, The Author's Effects anatomises the how and why of the emergence, establishment, and endurance of popular notions of authorship in relation to creativity. It traces how and why the writer's bodily remains, possessions, and spaces came to be treasured in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as a prelude to the appearance of formal writer's house museums. It ransacks more than 100 museums and archives to tell the stories of celebrated and paradigmatic relics—Burns' skull, Keats' hair, Petrarch's cat, Poe's raven, Brontë's bonnet, Dickinson's dress, Shakespeare's chair, Austen's desk, Woolf's spectacles, Hawthorne's window, Freud's mirror, Johnson's coffee-pot and Bulgakov's stove, amongst many others. It investigates houses within which nineteenth-century writers mythologised themselves and their work—Thoreau's cabin and Dumas' tower, Scott's Abbotsford and Irving's Sunnyside. And it tracks literary tourists of the past to such long-celebrated literary homes as Petrarch's Arquà, Rousseau's Ile St Pierre, and Shakespeare's Stratford to find out what they thought and felt and did, discovering deep continuities with the redevelopment of Shakespeare's New Place for 2016.

When did Burns Suppers start? Why is it celebrated all over the world? Who can join in the fun? Spanning the history of the phenomenon, from the year of its creation in 1801 to the present day, this book offers you everything you need to know about the Burns Supper, and the poet for whom it is held every year. From the origins of the custom to its modern day interpretations, from the rituals and traditions to the fun and fellowship, this first full-length study of the unique annual celebration of Scotland's national poet answers every question you can think of, along with every one you can't.

A transnational study of the American Renaissance which explores the literary circulation of Middle Eastern translations of 19th-century U.S. literature.

The essays in this volume offer fresh and innovative considerations both of how children interacted with the world of print, and of how childhood circulated in the literary cultures of the eighteenth century. They engage with not only the texts produced for the period’s newly established children’s book market, but also with the figure of the child as it was employed for a variety of purposes in literatures for adult readers. Embracing a wide range of methodological and disciplinary perspectives and considering a variety of contexts, these essays explore childhood as a trope that gained increasing cultural significance in the period, while also recognizing children as active agents in the worlds of familial and social interaction. Together, they demonstrate the varied experiences of the eighteenth-century child alongside the shifting, sometimes competing, meanings that attached themselves to childhood during a period in which it became the subject of intensified interest in literary culture.

A study of literary tourism in North America as well as Britain, and a unique exploration of popular response to writers, literary house museums, and the landscapes or "countries" associated with their lives and works.