America's England
Subtitle
Antebellum Literature and Atlantic Sectionalism
The wealth of transatlantic scholarship to emerge in recent years has greatly enriched our understanding of the mutual, far-reaching cultural exchange between Great Britain and the United States. Yet scholars often lose sight of this relationship in the years immediately leading up to the outbreak of the Civil War. Drawing on a capacious array of travel narratives, novels, poems, political scuffles and more, Christopher Hanlon's innovative study examines the patterns of affiliation through which U.S. culture encoded the turmoil of antebellum America in terms of imagined connections with England.
Through engagement with contemporaneous renditions of English race, history, landscape aesthetics, telecommunications, and economic discourse, America's England reveals how northern and southern partisans re-imagined the terms behind their antagonisms, forming a transatlantic surround for the otherwise cisatlantic political struggles that would dissolve the Union in 1861. Demonstrating that English genealogies, geographies, and economics shaped the sectional crisis for antebellum Americans on both sides of the Mason-Dixon, "America's England" locates the key crisis points of the period in a broader transatlantic constellation that provided distinctive circumstances for literary production.
Bio
Christopher Hanlon is a professor in the School of Humanities, Arts and Cultural Studies in the New College of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences. Hanlon researches and teaches courses in 19th century transatlantic and U.S. literature.
Praise for this book
The real joy here is Hanlon's thorough historicizing, ambitious interdisciplinarity, and willingness to read canonical figures like Emerson alongside popular works with which they were in conversation. ... Hanlon may be guilty on occasion of over-quoting from his copious collection of primary sources, but such exuberance is forgivable as an outgrowth of his fastidiousness in seamlessly combining history and literature.
Todd Nathan Thompson, Nineteenth-Century Prose Indiana State University
Hanlon’s work is especially interesting because he does not just talk about comparisons and connections but rather argues that what may have seemed a very American argument could in fact be seen within the terms of the transatlantic. The significance of this claim is enormous, because it suggests that even the most seemingly domestic issue can have a transatlantic character.
Jennifer Clark, Early American Literature University of Adelaide
