Overview

Analyses Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson against the background of Anglo-American print culture and oral performance Develops a new analytical framework for the study of nineteenth-century transatlantic writing that combines literary studies, book history and cultural sociology Reframes canonical works through unfamiliar texts and contexts Draws on a rich body of archival sources and historical periodical publications Offers an in-depth account of nineteenth-century Anglo-American print culture and the transatlantic lecture system Examining the transatlantic writings and professional careers of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, this book explores the impact of literary, cultural, political and legal manifestations of authority on nineteenth-century British and American writing, publishing and lecturing. Drawing on primary texts in conjunction with a rich body of archival sources, this study retraces Romantic debates about race and nationhood, analyses the relationship between cultural nationalism and literary historiography and sheds light on Carlyle's and Emerson's professional identities as publishing authors and lecturing celebrities on both sides of the Atlantic.

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9781474491952

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Reviews

"""Emerson and Carlyle were an odd couple and a transatlantic cultural powerhouse. Their decades-long exchange electrified literary circuits and jolted thinking about historiography, race, nationhood, copyright and lecturing, as Tim Sommer shows. This shrewd study of the nineteenth century's alternating currents of cultural authority snaps and crackles with insights."" -Mich le Mendelssohn, Oxford University"

Author Information

Tim Sommer is a Lecturer and Postdoctoral Researcher at the English Department of the University of Heidelberg. He has held visiting appointments at Harvard University and at the University of Cambridge. His research has appeared or is forthcoming in journals such as Romanticism, Book History, The New England Quarterly and The Wordsworth Circle.

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