Transatlantic Subjects

Transatlantic Subjects dissents from four decades of scholarly writing on colonial Canada by taking the British imperial context - rather than the North American environment - as a conceptual framework for interpreting patterns of social and cultural life in the colonies prior to the 1850s. Anchored in "the new British history" advanced by J.G.A. Pocock, David Armitage, and Kathleen Wilson, this collective work explores ideas, institutions, and social practices that were adapted and changed through the process of migration from the British archipelago to the new settlement societies. Contributors discuss a broad range of institutional and social practices, including education, religion, radical politics, and family life. Transatlantic Subjects offers a new perspective for the writing of Canada's history. A self-conscious response to the plea for a broader British history that includes the overseas settlement colonies, it makes a significant contribution to the new cultural history of the British Empire. Contributors include Bruce Curtis (Carleton), Michael Eamon (Queen's), Darren Ferry (McMaster), Donald Fyson (Laval), Michael Gauvreau (McMaster), Jeffrey McNairn (Queen's), Bryan Palmer (Queen's), J.G.A. Pocock (Johns Hopkins), Michelle Vosburgh (Brock), Todd Webb (Laurentian), and Brian Young (McGill)."

The early twentieth century was marked by massive migration of southern Europeans to the United States. Transatlantic Subjects views this diaspora through the lens of Greek migrant life to reveal the emergence of transnational forms of subjectivity. According to Ioanna Laliotou, cultural institutions and practices played an important role in the formation of migrant subjectivities. Reconstructing the cultural history of migration, her book points out the relationship between subjectivity formation and cultural practices and performances, such as publishing, reading, acting, storytelling, consuming, imitating, parading, and traveling. Transatlantic Subjects then locates the development of these practices within key sites and institutions of cultural formation, such as migrant and fraternal associations, educational institutions, state agencies and nongovernmental organizations, mental institutions, coffee shops, the church, steamship companies, banks, migration services, and chambers of commerce. Ultimately, Laliotou explores the complex and situational entanglements of migrancy, cultural nationalism, and the politics of self. Reading against the grain of hegemonic narratives of cultural and migration histories, she reveals how migrancy produced distinctive forms of sociality during the first half of the twentieth century.

Methodists in nineteenth-century Ontario and Quebec, like all British subjects, existed as satellites of an influential empire. Transatlantic Methodists uncovers how the Methodist ministry and laity in these colonies, whether they were British, American, or native-born, came to define themselves as transplanted Britons and Wesleyans, in response to their changing, often contentious relationship with the Wesleyan Methodist Church in Britain. Revising the nationalist framework that has dominated much of the scholarship on Methodism in central Canada, Todd Webb argues that a transatlantic perspective is necessary to understand the process of cultural formation among nineteenth-century Methodists. He shows that the Wesleyan Methodists in Britain played a key role in determining the identities of their colonial counterparts through disputes over the meaning of political loyalty, how Methodism should be governed, who should control church finances, and the nature and value of religious revivalism. At the same time, Methodists in Ontario and Quebec threatened to disrupt the Wesleyan Methodist Church in Britain and helped to trigger the largest division in its history. Methodists on both sides of the Atlantic shaped - and were shaped by - the larger British world in which they lived. Drawing on insights from new research in British, Atlantic, and imperial history, Transatlantic Methodists is a comprehensive study of how the nineteenth-century British world operated and of Methodism's place within it.

Presenting a discussion of the forces that created the first British Empire, this volume explores differing perspectives on the rise of Britain as a world power between the 16th & 19th centuries.

Cover -- Half Title -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Contents -- Introduction -- PART I: Travelling Subjects and Transitive Identities -- 1 Reformation in Mansfield Park : The Slave Trade and the Stillpoint of Knowledge -- 2 "That Dreadful, Delightful City": Edgar Allan Poe's Essaying of London -- 3 "Humble Auxiliaries to Nature": Go-Betweens and Natural Knowledge in Crèvecoeur's Journey into Northern Pennsylvania and the State of New York -- 4 Writing Pocahontas: Romantic Women Writers and the Transatlantic Rescuing Indian Maiden -- PART II: Ancient Decline and Nineteenth-Century Moralities -- 5 Women of Colour, Politics and the Plague in Lydia Maria Child's Philothea: A Grecian Romance -- 6 Christian Morality and Roman Depravity: Illustrating Edward Bulwer-Lytton's The Last Days of Pompeii in a Transatlantic Literary Market -- PART III: Transatlantic Print Culture and Transitive Texts -- 7 Virtual Museums in Early America: Transatlantic Magazine Culture and Cultural Memory -- 8 Cultural Transfer in the German Atlantic: Brown, Oertel, and the First Translation of a U.S. Novel -- 9 William Blake's American Afterlives: Transatlantic Poetics in Emerson and Whitman -- 10 American Notes and English Guidebooks: (Re)writing English Literature in Melville and Dickens -- List of Contributors -- Index

Daniel DeWispelare documents how many varieties of English became sidelined as "dialects" as Standard English became dominant throughout an ever-expanding English-speaking world, while asserting the importance of both multilingualism and dialect writing to eighteenth-century anglophone culture.