Rövid leírás:
Nation and Migration provides a literary history for a nation that still considers itself a land of immigrants, exploring the significant contributions of Scotland, Ireland, and Wales to the development of a British Atlantic literature and culture
Több
Hosszú leírás:
Nation and Migration provides a literary history for a nation that still considers itself a land of immigrants. Most studies of transatlantic literature focus primarily on what Stephen Spender has described as the „love-hate relations” between the United States and England, the imperial center of the British Atlantic world. In contrast, this book explores the significant contributions of Scotland, Ireland, and Wales to the development of a British Atlantic literature and culture. It argues that, by allowing England to stand in for the British archipelago, recent literary scholarship has oversimplified the processes through which the new United States differentiated itself culturally from Britain and underestimated the impact of migration on British nation formation during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
Scottish, Irish, and Welsh migrants brought with them to the American colonies and early republic stories and traditions very different from those shared by English settlers. Americans looked to these stories for narratives of cultural and racial origins through which to legitimate their new nation. Writers situated in Britain’s Celtic peripheries in turn drew on American discourses of rights and liberties to assert the cultural independence of Scotland, Ireland, and Wales from the English imperial center. The stories that late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britons and Americans told about transatlantic migration and settlement, whether from the position of migrant or observer, reveal the tenuousness and fragility of Britain and the United States as relatively new national entities. These stories illustrate the dialectial relationship between nation and migration.
Overall, this book makes a valuable contribution to our recognition of how regionalism continued to be a force both in Britain and in North America during the early national period. … Shield’s charting of the unfolding of archipelagic British literatures „in dialectical relation to their American counterparts” (127) adds an important dimension to our understanding of the transatlantic cultural matrix at the turn of the nineteenth century.
Több
Tartalomjegyzék:
Introduction: Decentering Transatlantic Literary Studies
Chapter One: From English Empire to British Atlantic World
Chapter Two: The Irish Uncanny and the American Gothic
Chapter Three: Scots and Scott in the Early Republic
Chapter Four: Wales and the American West
Chapter Five: The Literary Sketch and British Atlantic Regionalism
Conclusion: British Atlantic Worlds: Anglo-American, Colonial, and Archipelagic
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