Citation

Pace J. Lit. Compass 2008; 5(2): 228-291.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2008, John Wiley and Sons)

DOI

10.1111/j.1741-4113.2008.00511.x

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

In ‘Transatlanticism Now,’ Laura Stevens suggests that scholars should construct a taxonomy of the field. This article takes its cue from Stevens and classifies existing research as well as outlines categories for future scholarship, based on where knowledge of the field runs threadbare and where there is the most pressing need for scholarly study. Future work on transatlantic romanticism must incorporate more studies of women and people of color as well as interdisciplinary and intra-disciplinary connections (especially to transnational, transpacific, transoceanic, and postcolonial studies). The article seeks to provide the most complete survey and definition of transatlantic romanticism to date as well as a good starting point for all researching and teaching in the field. Based on a firm belief that further scholarship is needed to define this field, this article is an open call for more work on transatlantic romanticism(s) and the development of existing categories as well as new ones. The following categories are interdependent, not hierarchical; they do not seek to differentiate between, say, British and American Romanticism, but to set up comparatist frameworks that link, rather than separate, transatlantic romanticisms: ‘Imag-I-Nations: race, gender, colonialism, notions of national identity and the self’; ‘Circum-Atlantic sisterhood and brotherhood: Atlantic constructs of femininity and masculinity’; ‘Revolution, Rebellion, and Reform: communities of interpreters and literary history’; ‘Transatlantic Greenery: nature, ecology, and the politics and poetics of preservation and pastoral’; ‘Trans(atlantic) migration of souls: conversations with other wor(l)ds’; ‘Transatlantic romanticisms and science: the physical and the mind’; ‘Emotion and sensibility: transatlantic discourses of sympathy, sentiment, and feeling’; ‘Transatlantic travel writing: the ethnocentric Atlantic and international interventions’; ‘Literary and cultural aesthetics and genres: influence, confluence, and difference’; and ‘Transatlantic Translation: language, diction, linguistics, and stylistics.’